


This Complicated Life

by 5a5b5p5



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Restaurant, Chef! Andrew, Eventual mild sexual content, Friendship, M/M, Neil Josten & Aaron Minyard Friendship, Pining, Secret Relationship, Waiter! Neil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:49:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 52,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27394513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/5a5b5p5/pseuds/5a5b5p5
Summary: “This is exactly why I don’t want you and Andrew to meet,” Aaron says grumpily. “You two would get along far too well.”Neil grins. “I just like pissing you off,” he says, “It’s not my fault your brother does such a good job at it.”—Neil doesn’t expect much from his Sophomore year of college, but when he becomes a waiter at thePalmetto Bistro, his life gets a whole lot more interesting. As it turns out, maintaining friendships new and old as well as navigating an interesting relationship with the head chef of the restaurant—who just so happens to be his best friend’s twin brother—is a lot more complicated than he’d thought it would be.(this fic will update on wednesdays)
Relationships: Background relationships - Relationship, Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard
Comments: 398
Kudos: 980





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hello! i’m so excited to start posting this fic! i hope you enjoy it!  
> this fic will update on wednesdays!
> 
> quick disclaimer that this is an au! things don’t go the same as canon, and the characters have had slightly different lives prior to this story.

Neil looks to his left, where his phone is buzzing insistently against the rickety wooden nightstand that had been in the apartment when they’d moved in, its vibrations jostling particles of dirt and wood that had disintegrated off of the thing into the air.

Neil makes no move to pick it up. He knows without even looking that it’s Uncle Stuart checking in on him for the sixth time this week, since he’s the only one who ever calls Neil aside from Aaron, who is snoring loudly from the next room over.

Stuart means well, Neil knows, and he’s sure the man is having some severe separation anxiety now that Neil is back in the states for collage, but two phone calls a day is far too much for Neil to handle regardless. He waits for the call to time out before he picks his phone up to check the time, sighing when he realizes it’s only five in the morning. Stuart must have forgotten about the time difference again.

Wide awake now despite the early hour, Neil makes his way through his and Aaron’s tiny apartment to start making coffee, making enough for Aaron as well since he’s an early bird and the odds are he’ll be awake before too much longer anyways.

He stands and waits for the coffee to brew, staring at the wall in a way Aaron always complains is creepy, thinking about nothing in particular until the pot starts to beep and Neil has to pour himself a cup of coffee to stop himself from zoning out for an indeterminable amount of time and freaking Aaron out when he wakes up.

Coffee in hand, Neil makes his way into the connected living room and plops himself down on the couch, switching on the TV and scrolling through the channels until he finds a nature documentary about snakes he’s mildly interested in, cupping his mug close to his chest with both hands and sipping his drink slowly, crossing his legs.

Neil is draining the last dregs of his coffee and watching a snake constrict around a gopher without much emotion when Aaron finally stumbles into the living room, yawning into his elbow with his glasses crooked on his nose and his eyes bleary.

“Morning loser,” Aaron greets him kindly, coming around behind the couch he see what Neil’s watching and promptly cringing away. “You’re being creepy again,” he says.

Neil hums, tilting his head back on the couch and staring up at Aaron at a very unflattering angle, smiling wryly at the inside of his nose. “Morning,” Neil says, poking the underside of Aaron’s chin harshly. “It’s educational,” he says.

Aaron and Neil watch, transfixed, as the snake slowly devours the gopher. “It’s murder,” Aaron argues, shivering.

“It’s the circle of life, pissbaby.”

Aaron scoffs, “It’s too early for this,” he says, turning on his heel and pouring himself a cup of coffee.

He returns to sit next to Neil on the couch without argument, though, and Neil grins at Aaron when he makes no move to change the channel. “You like the murder,” Neil teases, a smile in his voice.

Aaron frowns, holding his coffee mug close to his chest. “It’s strangely fascinating,” he admits as the snake starts to slither again with a sizable lump in the middle of its body.

Neil hums in agreement. The screen changes to show two snakes wrapped around each other compromisingly. Neil changes the channel. “Breakfast?”

Aaron flops back onto the couch, raising his coffee mug in answer. “Coffee,” he replies, and then frowns. “Andrew asked me for lunch today.”

Neil raises an eyebrow. Andrew Minyard is the closest thing to a cryptid Neil has ever encountered. He’s Aaron’s twin brother, allegedly, and despite being friends—or something—with Aaron for over a year, Neil has only ever caught a glimpse of the man once, and he’s still not convinced it hadn’t just been Aaron wearing all black and a chef’s hat.

That being said, if Andrew were actually a real person… “ _He_ asked _you_ to lunch?”

Aaron scowls. He complains relentlessly about his twin’s terrible communication skills, citing years of separation and confusion as the cause, and he doesn’t appreciate it when Neil points out that he’s not much better at it than he describes Andrew as. “Not in those exact words.”

Neil grins. “Did he call you a nimrod and throw a croissant at you with a piece of paper inside of it that says _Noon. Lunch. Here._ again? Or was that a one-time thing?” Neil had laughed on and off for an hour after Aaron had come home and told him about that. Aaron hadn’t discovered the note until he’d taken a bite of the croissant and gotten a mouth full of it, and it had been an act of complete genius. It’s the main reason Neil wants to meet Andrew Minyard so badly, though Aaron is still very adamant about the two of them never meeting each other for some undisclosed reason.

Presently, Aaron is making a face similar to the one he’d made when Neil had first cackled about the croissant incident, and places his mug on their coffee table perhaps a bit too aggressively to be casual. “No,” he says. “He threw a croissant at me and watched as I picked it apart before he _told_ me I was coming to lunch with him today.”

Before Aaron can even finish the story, Neil starts laughing anew at the mental image of Aaron suspiciously tearing apart an innocent piece of bread, still holding his empty mug in his hand as he tries to get himself under control.

Neil huffs out a few more laughs before he sighs and looks back up at his roommate, who has a sour look on his face, and promptly starts laughing again.

“This is exactly why I don’t want you and Andrew to meet,” Aaron says grumpily. “You two would get along far too well.”

Neil grins. “I just like pissing you off,” he says, “It’s not my fault your brother does such a good job at it.”

“Whatever,” Aaron huffs, before promptly launching into his newest experience involving the girl in his biology class he’s been courting. Or not courting, since he’s never actually spoken to the girl. Apparently Aaron had seen her working at the library when he’d gone to pick up a book he’d put on hold, and she had waved at him when she’d noticed him staring at her like a creep. It’s the most excited Neil has seen him since he’d found out her name was Katelyn and spent the next few weeks sighing dreamily and asking _Katelyn is such a pretty name, right Neil?_

It’s awful, but Neil is almost glad his friend has found a single girl to focus all of his attention on instead of flitting from girl to girl every other day.

But then again, Neil would be a bad friend if he didn’t listen to and support Aaron throughout his obsessions. Even though Aaron has a few friends he hangs out with often enough both from his classes and from his old job, Neil has been in his top friendship slot for almost as long as they’d known each other. When they had met, Neil had been fresh out of London, where he had been staying with Stuart since he’d been released from Witness Protection after the death of the last of his father’s men at the age of 18. Before then, he’d been staying with his mother in a shitty apartment just south of Columbia, South Carolina, where he had gone to high school and met Jean, Kevin, and Riko. He’d taken a gap year after high school, but his mother had died only a few weeks after his graduation from a heart condition she had developed as a result of Neil’s father’s heavy hands, and Neil hadn’t had anywhere else to go.

Aaron had been working at the Palmetto Bistro with his twin as a waiter at the time, but when Andrew had been promoted to head chef and Aaron had only been further swamped by his class work, Andrew had insisted Aaron quit in order to focus on his school work. Aaron still keeps in touch with most of the people he’d worked with though, and the Palmetto Bistro has been trying to fill his position for months now with varied success.

Neil, however, has had a… significantly lower friendship success rate. Between his first friendships all being scraped thanks to his horrible home life, and his high school friend group being both toxic and nonexistent since he’d relocated to London, he can confidently say that Aaron is one of his only friends.

There’s Kevin and Jean, Neil supposes, but he’d never been that close to Kevin, and while he and Jean try to call each other semi-regularly, they’ve been going longer and longer in between check-ins.

The two of them had been Neil’s main reason for choosing Palmetto State for his college, despite being offered time and time again by Stuart the chance to pursue a much more… distinguished education quite literally anywhere else.

He’d met Aaron in his physics class freshman year, which Neil had taken as his minor on a whim and then promptly begun to fail, and Aaron had been the main reason he had been able to maintain a C average in the class.

He and Jean had tried to meet up a few different times over freshman year, but they had mostly stuck to their phone calls, and Neil had still felt too weird about Kevin to try and hang out with them both at the same time—since Riko had returned to Japan with his brother in the summer between Junior and Senior year of high school they had rarely been spotted more than 10 feet away from each other.

It was complicated, as most things in Neil’s life were, and in the end Neil had only returned to America for his Sophomore year because of Aaron, not that he’d ever admit it. He and Jean had tried to keep in touch, but it’s probably well passed time for them to phone again if they wanted to keep up that pretense.

Maybe that is what Neil will do today. Before he can talk himself out of it, Neil pulls up Jean’s contact—which is only third in his phone under Aaron and Stuart despite months of silence between them—and sends him a text.

**Neil: You want to call later?**

Aaron sends him a curious look from across the couch when he sees Neil texting, but he doesn’t pry. Neil has told him enough about his childhood and teenage years over the past year that he knows it’s probably something he doesn’t want to get involved with.

Before too much longer, Aaron stands up from the couch to start getting ready for his lunch with Andrew—he always puts in an almost endearing amount of effort before meeting him—and Neil flops out on the couch with his phone on his chest, thinking.

He wonders if Jean would even want to talk to him, or if he just wants to forget about him like he forgot about Riko’s abuse and dismissed it like it had never happened. It wouldn’t make much sense, considering he and Kevin are still attached at the hip, but then again, Jean had never made much sense. He’s almost been meticulous in his actions, whether they be in school or in his friendships, and Neil has never claimed to understand him.

Throughout high school, Neil had clung on to Jean like a lifeline, fighting to stay afloat against the fear instilled in him by his father’s men on the loose, his mother’s heavy hands, and Riko’s emotional abuse. Kevin had been much the same, but in the end Neil had had to leave for London after Riko’s departure, and Kevin had been able to stay in South Carolina.

Aaron flits back into the living room briefly, and Neil wishes him good luck at his business meeting when he sees him all dressed up for a casual lunch with his literal twin. Aaron glares, but he allows Neil to not-so-gently bully him out of his slacks and button down and into a hoodie and jeans before he leaves.

Neil shakes his head after him; he doesn’t think he’ll ever understand why Aaron tries so hard around Andrew. From what he’d told Neil about him, that professionalism seems like the last thing Andrew would want from his brother, but he supposes Aaron’s crippling need to impress everyone he meets might have something to do with it.

Neil wanders into the kitchen again to put his mug in the sink, and starts to walk back towards the couch when he thinks better of it and turns on the water to do the dishes. It’s a Saturday, and he has nothing else to do now that Aaron isn’t here to entertain him.

He washes the rest of the dishes and then decides to clean up the rest of the kitchen on a whim. He pulls up his laptop and plays one of Aaron’s playlists creepily titled “Katelyn” which is just a bunch of songs with lots of instrumentals and sappy lyrics. He cleans the counters with a few wipes he finds under the sink that Aaron must have bought, and even goes so far as to take off the stove burners and clean the charred crumbs out from under there.

On a sudden burst of energy, Neil moves on to the bathroom, using supplies and chemicals he didn’t even know they had to clean the toilet and the shower, pouring something down the drain that claims it’ll make it stop clogging up.

Over an hour later, the playlist is still playing softly in the background as Neil sweeps the floors, and Neil is starting to think Aaron just added every single song he’s ever heard that could remotely apply to Katelyn to it. How embarrassing.

When he gets back into the living room and finally plops back onto the couch, the apartment is perhaps cleaner than it has ever been before, and the whole place smells like chemicals so strongly Neil feels a little lightheaded. When he checks his phone for the time, there’s a message from Jean waiting for him.

**Jean: Sure. 1:30?**

Alarmed, Neil checks the time at the top of the screen. It’s 1:28.

Neil sighs out a relieved breath and types out a quick reply before opening the window and propping it open with Aaron’s anatomy textbook so he doesn’t _actually_ pass out from the chemicals in the air, and as soon as he does so his phone begins to buzz against the coffee table, rattling a few pens scattered across it.

He picks it up hurriedly. “Jean?”

“Neil,” comes Jean’s tinny, lightly accented voice from through the speakers. “Hello.”

Neil lets out an accidental sigh at the sound of Jean’s voice, not quite knowing what to do with himself now that they’re in this situation. Neil’s never been one to carry a conversation in this manor, and he’s almost thrown back into their high school days, when Riko had told the three of them to _speak when spoken to_ in a way that had sent shivers down Neil’s spine the same way it had when his father had said those words.

Now though, it’s almost the opposite. Jean had spoken, and now it was Neil’s turn to do so. Neil can almost hear Aaron’s teasing voice telling him that _that’s how a normal-people conversation works, Josten, not that you would know._ It’s not entirely unwelcome.

Fortunately for Neil, Jean seems to sense his uncertainty, and prompts him by asking “What have you been up to?”

Neil thinks. What _has_ he been up to. He’s been going to classes. Talking to Aaron. Looking for a job but never applying anywhere. “Not much,” Neil admits, before adding, “looking for jobs, I guess,” because it feels like something a normal person might share in a conversation.

Across the line, Jean hums. “You know,” he starts, and Neil can still hear the smile in his voice, even after all these months. “Kevin’s been complaining for months about finding a competent replacement for your friend Aaron. You could apply there.”

Neil has considered that option before, but the idea of seeing Kevin everyday again had been too daunting for him to breach every time, and the fact that Aaron doesn’t want him meeting Andrew is also something to consider.

Still though, it feels more tempting now than it usually does for some reason. Jean’s voice across the line is making him consider the possibility of talking to Kevin again, something about the warm timbres of it reminding him of nights spent sprawled out on the floor of Kevin’s childhood bedroom, arms slung around each other and some dumb movie playing on the TV none of them would admit they’d been invested in.

That memory is just that though: a memory. Something stuck in the back of Neil’s mind he can pull out and examine when need be, but not something he will ever have the chance to experience again. “I’ll think about it,” Neil tells Jean, because he will.

Across the line, Jean hums again. “Should I tell Kevin you’re considering applying?”

Neil shivers at the thought, hoping that the shitty phone quality is betraying him and that Jean isn’t actually using his _mischievous_ voice. “No,” Neil says firmly. “You really shouldn’t do that.”

“But Neil,” Jean teases, and his voice is a lot lighter than Neil’s heard it in a while, “Don’t you want to get bossed around by Kevin again?”

Neil winces. “I really, really don’t, Jean,” he says, and Jean lets out a small huff of laughter.

They talk for a few more minutes, mostly idle chat and a few more laughs, before they finally hang up. Neil sets his phone on his chest, feeling sleepy and lightheaded from cleaning, and simultaneously heavier and lighter after his call with Jean.

He’s almost drifting off to sleep when his phone buzzes again with a text. Neil picks it up, expecting Aaron and nearly throwing his phone when he sees it’s been sent from Kevin Day.

**Kevin: You want to work at Palmetto’s?**

**Kevin: Interview with Wymack @9am tomorrow.**

**Neil: Wait**

But the damage had been done. Kevin wouldn’t stop pestering Neil about this until he showed up, and he wonders if he should feel offended that Jean told Kevin within an hour of Neil practically begging him not to.

Neil doesn’t have anything _against_ Palmetto’s, per say. More of a weariness to those who work there. Kevin is his ex-friend, Wymack is Kevin’s father, and Aaron has a strange aversion to him meeting his brother. Aaron’s other friends from Palmetto’s have always seemed very separate from Neil as well, and he had never made an effort to meet them despite Aaron’s offers for him to tag along.

Still though, Neil _does_ need a job, and he doubts he would be seeing much of Kevin and Andrew anyways, since he’d be waiting tables while they work in the kitchen.

Neil sighs, closing his eyes and tilting his head against the arm rest of the couch, waiting for Aaron to come back with extra of the mac and cheese he knows Neil likes from Palmetto’s. He debates telling his roommate about his suddenly-impending job interview, but Neil doesn’t think there’s any reason to inform him of it until he knows anything for sure.

How did he go from a quiet day in to a scheduled interview in less than twenty minutes?

_Goddamnit Jean._

~

The next morning, Neil sneaks out of the apartment before Aaron wakes up. Despite Aaron’s usual early rises, the man usually makes himself sleep in as late as possible on Sundays, since they are, quote: ‘his last day of freedom before academia hell starts again’.

That being said, Neil does still receive a few distressed text messages between the 15 minutes it takes to walk to the Palmetto Bistro.

**Aaron: where did you go?**

**Aaron: you’re usually back from runs by now**

**Aaron: if this is some mafia shit josten I swear to god**

**Aaron: wait you took a shower???**

Neil huffs a laugh when he reads the messages, sitting cross-legged on a bench outside of Palmetto’s, typing back a quick response to his over dramatic friend as to not give him an actual aneurysm.

**Neil: I can take care of myself you know**

**Neil: I have a job interview. Forgot to tell you.**

Neil pockets his phone again, choosing to ignore Aaron’s incredulous (and rude) response. It’s nearly nine, so he figures he should be heading inside any minute now. Just as he’s standing up, though, a large, burly man emerges from a nondescript Toyota and waves him over.

David Wymack is tall and muscular, and as Neil comes closer, the tribal tattoos on his arms come into view more clearly.

Neil has only actually met Kevin’s father once or twice, and they were both long enough ago that Neil doubts the other man remembers him at all.

Still though, Wymack greets him like an old friend, shaking his hand but thankfully not making as if to try and hug him. “Hey kid,” he says, “long time no see.”

Neil nods, letting Wymack lead him towards the back entrance of Palmetto’s. Outside the back of the building, there is a patch of pebbles that click under Neil’s steps when he walks over them, as well as another bench and a fancy ashtray.

Wymack types in the code for the back door, not bothering to shield it from Neil, who looks away anyway. They’re deposited directly into a large kitchen area, with copious amounts of metal and plastic black containers everywhere he looks. It’s a quite a few degrees warmer in the kitchen than it had been outside, but Neil can tell it has nothing to do with the internal heating and everything to do with the several large pots boiling on the stove.

Standing on a small wooden stool over the pots and looking like he’s just rolled out of bed is Andrew Minyard.

While the one time he’d caught sight of the man he’d been mostly unable to tell the difference between him and his twin, they are clear as day now, even with an entire kitchen between them. Andrew is wearing all black, and his platform boots make him taller than Aaron is on a good day, even if it’s hard to tell while he stands on the stool. He’s wearing a shortsleeved shirt and black armbands that hug his arms from wrist to elbow, and his light blonde hair is long and wavy on the top of his head and cropped on the sides, where Aaron’s is cropped short completely.

The pissed-off look on Andrew’s face, however, is almost a direct mirror of the one Neil knows so well from his brother, if a little more intimidating.

“Minyard,” Wymack booms from beside him, and Neil startles a little, almost having forgotten the presence of the taller man. “Where is your goddamned hat? We don’t need your hair in the soups.”

Andrew scowls, placing a long wooden spoon over the top of the pot he’s been stirring and turning to face the two of them completely. He falters for a moment when he spots Neil, narrowing his eyes, but it’s such a minute expression that Neil nearly doesn’t notice it, watching Andrew reach out a blind hand and flip Wymack off.

Beside him, Wymack huffs, but he doesn’t say anything else, instead leading Neil into a room that sprouts off from the kitchen and seems to be an office. It’s cluttered, with a large desk shoved into the far corner and light streaming in through a window in the ceiling. There are papers spread on every possible surface, and the scents of dust and sandalwood spins in the air.

Wymack takes a seat behind the desk in the corner, his back to the wall and front to the rest of the room. He rummages around in the cluttered corner until he finds a metal fold-up chair, and he lifts it over the desk without much ceremony, unfolding it and gesturing for Neil to take a seat.

He does, and Wymack leans back in his chair, stretching his arms up above his head. “Look kid,” he says, “I gotta be honest about the fact that I don’t do all that much around here anymore. I get the office because I do the paperwork and because I own this place, but you’re gonna have to go through Andrew first, I’m afraid. He’s getting this place once I’m finally wasted away, which won’t be too much longer at this point.”

Neil frowns. Wymack can’t be much older than 50, and he doesn’t seem to be much worse for wear than the last time Neil had seen the man nearly five years ago. He must be aiming for an early retirement. Still though… “You’re not going to give it to Kevin?”

A small smile graces Wymack’s face, and he taps his fingers on the desk a few times before he answers. “No,” he says, “No, Kevin doesn’t want to do this. The whole ‘don’t be like your father’ thing and all. He’s too busy with all his classes and such to do much more than boss Andrew around in the kitchen every once in a while and try not to get kicked in the face for it.”

Neil thinks that probably checks out. Kevin’s always been more of a history nerd than a chef anyways. Neil wonders if he’s actually pursuing the historian route like he always swore he would in high school.

“Right,” Wymack says finally. “This is all well and good, but do you have your resume?”

Neil does, thankfully. It’s old; it’s one of the ones you make in business class in high school and don’t update ever again, but Neil doesn’t think it will be too much of an issue. As suspected, Wymack barely glances at it, tucking it away in one of his desk drawers when Neil’s sure he will never see it again, before standing heavily and motioning for Neil to do the same.

Wymack says, “Andrew will want to talk to you now,” and he probably tries to make it sound less ominous than it does. “If he decides you’re all right, you can start in a few days and Matt or Allison can show you the ropes then.”

Neil nods, letting Wymack guide him back out into the kitchen and then promptly close the door to the office between himself and Neil. And Andrew.

Andrew is sitting on top of the counter now, still stirring the pots of soup lazily, his heavy boots thudding against the lower cabinets with every minute swing of his legs. He’s still not wearing his chef’s hat, but upon closer interpretation Neil can see that he has a near-invisible hairnet on. Andrew’s already looking at Neil, and his mouth quirks up when he sees the undoubtedly deer-in-the-headlights look on Neil’s face. “Josten,” he greets, “I don’t believe we’ve met before. How is domestic bliss with my brother?”

Neil fights to keep his face blank. “Good,” he says. “Last night we watched 101 Dalmatians and he kept bringing you up whenever Cruella de Vil was on screen.”

Andrew smirks slightly, and it’s a much different expression on his face than it is on Aaron’s. It’s… subtler somehow. More reserved. More confident. He kicks his legs out straight, letting the very edges of his boots rest against the wooden island countertop across from him. “Sit, Neil,” he says, and it sounds like a truce.

Neil takes it, crossing the large kitchen and hoisting himself up onto the counter. If he kicked his legs out, his and Andrew’s legs would brush. He doesn’t kick his legs out. “Isn’t there a more professional place we could do this?” Neil asks, looking around the kitchen pointedly, his eyes coming to a rest on the pots of boiling soup.

Andrew shrugs. “What do you think _this_ is?”

“An interview?” Neil guesses. He’d _thought_ this was an interview. “Though it’s starting to feel more like an interrogation now.”

Andrew scoffs, peering into the pots and then fiddling with the stove controls until the soups relax into a gentle simmer. “You would know if I were interrogating you,” he says.

“What is it then?”

Andrew hops off the counter. “A test,” he says, walking around the island Neil’s sitting on and disappearing behind it as he crouches down for something. “You passed. You can start Wednesday.”

Neil scrambles off the counter, looking at Andrew incredulously. “That’s it?”

Andrew hums. “Yep,” he says, emerging from under the cabinets with an enormous skillet. “I recommend telling Aaron about this before he finds out from me.”

~

After Neil’s ‘interview’, he stops by the grocery store for a few things, making sure to pick up an extra package of the rice cakes Aaron likes just in case.

When he finally gets home, arms aching and slightly sweaty from the walk despite the coolness of the afternoon, he finds Aaron curled up on the couch. He’s wearing the soft woolen sweater Neil had brought him back from his summer in London, and he has their fluffy grey blanket draped over his shoulders so only his face and some of his chest are showing.

“It’s not even that cold yet,” Neil says on his way to the kitchen, where he drops off his grocery bags on the counter, beginning to sort out their spoils.

“Fuck off,” comes Aaron’s muffled voice from the living room.

Neil grins to himself. He wonders, briefly, if Andrew is as much of a baby about the cold as his brother, before he immediately shakes himself out of _that_ thought. Since when does he care about anything Andrew does?

Aaron shuffles into the kitchen a moment later, blanket still draped around his shoulders and socked feet slipping against the wooden floors. “How was your interview?” Aaron asks, his greedy little hands rummaging around in the grocery bags until he finds the rice cakes and shoving one in his mouth plain like a heathen.

Neil bites his tongue against the teasing insult brewing in his mind. He needs Aaron on his good side right now. “It was good,” Neil tells him. “I start Wednesday.”

“Nice,” Aaron says, and when Neil glances over at him, he has a genuine smile on his face, encouraging and proud. “Where are you working?” Neil takes a bite of a plain rice cake to hide his grimace, only to grimace at the plainness of it anyway. He goes searching for the peanut butter.

Neil doubts Aaron is going to _actually_ be mad at him, since he has never actually told Neil directly that he doesn’t want him to work at Palmetto’s. But, as Neil has found out over the last year or so, Aaron Minyard is extremely petty, so there is really no telling how long he will be annoying about this once Neil tells him.

He takes his time spreading peanut butter over his rice cake and muffles his answer into it when he takes a bite. “Palmetto’s.”

Aaron narrows his eyes. “What?”

He says it like he already knows the answer. “Palmetto’s,” Neil says again, louder.

Aaron crosses his arms over his chest, stealing Neil’s half eaten rice cake and walking back into the living room with it without another word.

Neil looks at the place his snack had been moments before, giving Aaron time to process for the time it takes him to make another one. On the couch, Aaron has unwrapped the blanket from around him and placed it over his lap, and he’s staring blankly at the TV as National Geographic shows a snapping turtle eating a cactus. Neil sits down next to him.

“It’s a good job,” Aaron says eventually, rice cake crumbs coating his lap. “You are going to have fun there.”

Neil opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again to ask, “You’re not mad?”

Aaron rolls his eyes. “No,” he says, brushing the crumbs off of his lap. “You _are_ your own person, Josten. You do your own shit.”

Neil frowns. He’d known _that,_ obviously. But still… “Why were you so adamant about Andrew and I not meeting? He’s a dick, yeah, but he’s not… bad.”

Aaron brings his knees up to his chest, his socked toes poking out from the edge of the blanket. “I told you already. You guys are going to get along like a house on fire and I… didn’t want you to like him more than me.”

He says the last part in a rush, but Neil catches it anyways, grinning. “You were _afraid,_ ” he teases. “You were afraid I would like your asshole brother more than you, my best friend.”

Aaron looks away. “It was a moment of weakness,” he says.

Neil scoffs. “Yeah, a moment of weakness prolonged over the span of a year.”

“Shut it, Josten,” Aaron mutters, kicking out his leg until he can poke Neil’s ribs harshly with his foot.

Neil grins harder, but he makes himself sober up slightly, tapping Aaron’s socked foot to get his attention. “Seriously though, Aaron,” he starts. “I didn’t come back here after the mess of Freshman year just to ditch you.”

Aaron allows a small smile.“You _did_ pass up the chance to go to Oxford because you missed me.”

“Why would I want to go to some stiff academic nerd school when I have my own stiff academic nerd right here?” Neil asks, and Aaron scowls.

For the next few hours, Aaron and Neil sit on the couch, watching National Geographic and eating rice cakes, until one of them finally gets up to make them some boxed spaghetti Aaron tells Neil Andrew would throw a fit over.

The reminder of the man brings Neil’s mind back to earlier, when he’d finally met Andrew after months of _wondering._ Neil hadn’t gone in to the meetings with any expectations, per say, but he would still probably say that Andrew had surprised him. The man he’d met today hadn’t been anything like the stoic asshole Aaron had described to him time and time again, but he hadn’t been like the man Neil had been eager to meet either. The Andrew Neil had met today hadn’t been emotionless, but he also hadn’t been cracking jokes and dragging Aaron like he did in some of Aaron’s stories.

The Andrew he’d met today had been sleepy at nine in the morning. He’d been contradictory. He had been interesting and respectful of Wymack’s wishes despite how outwardly uncaring he had seemed. He hadn’t grilled Neil for information or asked to hear about his achievements. In fact, he hadn’t said much at all. He had let Neil speak and been amused by his joke. He had tilted his head in consideration and seemed to carry himself with an air of lazy confidence, both in his cooking and in their conversation. He had seemed interested in what Neil had had to say, and yet he had sent him away after only a few minutes of talking.

Contradictions.

Later that night, Neil slides into bed with a sigh, making a mental note to call Stuart next weekend and tell him about his new job—assuming he’ll keep it that long.

He closes his eyes lightly, trying to push down the flutter of excitement in his stomach when he thinks about Wednesday. 

He hopes he isn’t biting off more than he can chew with this.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s chefdrew day! I hope you enjoy this chapter :) things are beginning to happen!!

On Tuesday, Aaron wants to go for dinner at Palmetto’s. This in and of itself is strange, since he’s never shown any interest in bringing Neil along with him when he’s gone before, but when asked, Aaron only shrugs and says, “There’s no point in keeping you away now.”

Neil’s brain is beyond mush from the pile of math homework he’d plowed through earlier, and beside him Aaron doesn’t look much better off. He’s wearing the pair of jeans with white paint spattered over them from the time they’d painted the bathroom—it had been a horrible shade of pink before that _definitely_ hadn’t been worth the previous renters losing their security deposit—along with a graphic tee that depicts a green blob holding a cellphone with the word “Cell-fie!” printed under it.

He’s looked better.

They’re standing in the living room, swaying tiredly as they collect their essential items. Tuesdays are usually their takeout or restaurant day, because it’s the day that school hits both of them the hardest and they both know they wouldn’t eat otherwise.

It’s not rare that Aaron would have lunch at Palmetto’s—or even dinner if he’s meeting one of his friends—since Andrew gives him a 50% discount that he always ends of paying the rest of for his brother anyways.

Neil, however, had never been inside of the place aside from his job interview a few days ago. He knows he likes the mac and cheese, since Aaron usually brings him back a little container of it on days he goes out without Neil and leaves him to fend for himself, which never really goes well.

He wonders fleetingly if he’s eaten Andrew’s mac and cheese before. Probably.

Neither he nor Aaron own a car, so they’re forced to walk everywhere they go, not that this is usually a problem, since their apartment is only about half a block off-campus, and everything else they need is within a mile from there. The cool October evening is enough to wake Neil up a little more. His senses are dulled and fuzzy from his classes and his math homework, but as he takes a deep breath he can smell pine and cedar in the air, sharpening his senses and boosting his mood almost immediately.

He and Aaron walk to Palmetto’s in near-silence, listening to the whisper of the wind and the crunch of leaves under their feet. They walk until Palmetto’s comes into view, and by then Neil’s stomach is growling urgently. The building is unimpressive under the streetlights, but there is something about it that draws Neil towards it like a siren call. The structure is wooden, rickety and splintery from one too many hurricanes, and there is smoke billowing out of the chimney, the smell of cooking permeating the air. 

The parking lot to Palmetto’s is full, and as soon as they push in through the doors warmth and the sounds of laughter wash over them, enveloping Neil completely. The place has been decorated for Halloween, and there are orange and white string lights everywhere Neil looks, casting the open dining area in a pillowy orange light. There are fake cobwebs piled up in the corners and on the brick of the fire place housing a crackling fire that exudes warmth all the way across the room. There are little plastic spiders in the webs.

The room somehow manages to feel both enormous and cramped at the same time. The traditional glow from the ceiling lights are muted and cast shadows over the tables and chairs, and the tables are spread far enough away from each other to maintain the precedence of personal space. In the corner, there is a full-sized bar Neil hadn’t known was there, and there are two people working seamlessly behind it as customers beg for alcohol. The petite, white-haired woman passes the olive-skinned man a bottle without looking behind her, and the man laughs at something she says to him, turning to pour a drink on the opposite side of the bar.

It’s busy, for a Tuesday night. Most of the patrons linger at the bar, almost all of the stools there filled, but the seating area is mostly vacant aside from a few families and the college students that didn’t feel like getting wasted on a weekday.

A short woman with dark features greets them at the host stand, nodding at Aaron with a smile, who returns her gesture easily. Her name tag reads _Dan,_ and she looks at Neil curiously before leading them to a table through the door to another open seating area that is even more empty, setting their menus down at the table closest to the kitchen.

“Can I get you anything to drink, Mr. Minyard,” Dan asks, but it sounds teasing and light.

Aaron rolls his eyes and tells her he wants water, thankfully. Neil doesn’t know if he’d be able to deal with dragging a tipsy Aaron all the way back to their apartment. When Neil looks up from his lap and finds them both staring at him expectedly. “Uhh,” Neil says, eloquently. “One second.”

Dan smiles, “No problem…” she trails off.

“Neil,” Aaron finishes for her, ignoring the way Dan’s face lights up at the name. “Figure out what you want to eat now too and we can order early.”

Neil nods, not meeting Dan’s eyes even as he feels her gaze on him still. He’s aware that Aaron must talk about him a lot, and that Dan is one of Aaron’s other friends, but it is hard for Neil to talk to people he doesn’t know even now. In fact, now that he’s thinking of it, Andrew is the only new person he’s talked to in years that hadn’t put him on edge. He suspects that must have been due to Neil being so close with his twin.

Dan and Aaron chat for a few minutes while Neil looks through the menu, unsurprisingly deciding on the baked mac and cheese and a lemonade. Dan scribbles something on her note pad and trots off behind them into the kitchen, presumably to deliver their order to the chefs.

Across the table, Aaron says, “She’s only telling him that way because our table is so close to the kitchens. When you start working here they’ll show you how to work the electronics.”

Neil nods, but when he sees the serious look on Aaron’s face, he can’t help but grin. “You trying to teach me how to follow in your footsteps?”

Aaron scoffs, “As if you could ever—” but he cuts himself off as his eyes focus on a spot behind Neil’s head. Neil, who is facing the rest of the room with his back to the kitchen, turns around in alarm, expecting a threat.

What he is _not_ expecting to see is Andrew Minyard barreling out of the swinging kitchen doors easily balancing a circular tray of drinks on his hand. He’s actually wearing the chef’s hat this time, and he’s got that same confident twitch of his lips he had worn during their first meeting a few days ago. Neil finds himself transfixed on the expression, unable to look away from the dimple that graces Andrew’s cheek. “Josten,” he says breezily, ignoring his brother’s presence. “Fancy seeing you here.”

Neil turns back around in his seat as Andrew stands at the side of their table, wheezing a laugh when he sees the distressed look on Aaron’s face. “You’re not a waiter,” Aaron says harshly, but Neil can hear the genuine confusion underneath the words.

Andrew shrugs, placing the glass of water in front of his brother and the lemonade in front of Neil, the delicate curl of his wrist hidden under the armbands he wears and the flex of his bicep visible through the material of a tight black t-shirt. His fingers drag along the smooth wooden table as he relinquishes his hand. “We’re short,” Andrew says, “Allison took an impromptu day off and our new recruit hasn’t started yet.” He glares at Neil pointedly, who squawks.

“I— _you_ told _me_ to start tomorrow.”

“Yes, yes,” Andrew says, waving his hand dismissively, “And I regret it more with every passing moment.” He’s far more talkative now than he had been during Neil’s interview, and Neil wonders if it has to do with anything other than the late hour.

Across their small table, Aaron has his eyes narrowed in Andrew’s direction. “What’s your motive here?”

Andrew’s eyebrow quirks, and he leans his hip against the table lazily. “No motive,” he says, those fingers still tapping away at the shiny table. “Wait staff needed some help and I would never pass up the opportunity to serve my brother and his little stray—even if it _is_ to give them possibly the most boring drink order in existence.”

Andrew makes a motion to the dark-haired man working behind the bar, and the man holds up two fingers, nodding. Andrew tucks his grin into the corner of his mouth for only a moment before it disappears again entirely. “Besides,” Andrew continues distractedly, “I’m on break.”

Neil frowns, trying to interpret what _that_ could have possibly meant, taking a sip of his lemonade and immediately scrunching up his nose from the sweetness of it. He coughs. “What the hell is this? It’s like drinking liquid sugar.”

Aaron rolls his eyes, well used to Neil’s aversion to sugar by now, but when Neil looks back up at Andrew, he is somehow managing to look both incredibly curious and incredibly offended at the same time. “That is the only acceptable way lemonade should taste,” Andrew says.

“Don’t even start with him, Andrew,” Aaron says, squeezing his lemon wedge into his ice water and swirling it around like he’s at a wine tasting. “He won’t even put sugar in his coffee.”

Andrew looks at him closely. Says, “Maybe we should reconsider our employee requirements,” and turns on his heel to make his way back into the kitchen.

From across the table, Aaron says, “I take it back. I would have introduced you guys months ago if I knew it was going to be this entertaining.”

Neil scowls, watching as Andrew shoulders open the swinging doors to the kitchen and then watching his retreating back until the doors close behind him. The dark-haired man from the bar comes into view suddenly, disappearing into the kitchen not ten seconds after Andrew. Neil frowns, wondering what must be going on there and failing miserably. Trying to be annoyed at Andrew for his words and failing miserably. Trying to be angry with Aaron for teasing him and failing again.

The baked macaroni and cheese is even more delicious than usual, unfortunately.

~

The next morning, Neil goes through the motions like it’s a normal day, going for a quick run and coming back to the apartment to find Aaron already in the kitchen looking drowsy but decidedly awake. Neil yells out a request for coffee as he passes on the way to the shower, which Aaron returns with a grunt of confirmation.

He showers quickly, dressing in a pair of jeans and a faded sweatshirt, grabbing his coffee in a thermos and spreading a sloppy mess of peanut butter onto a rice cake on his way out, hurrying out the door so he’s not late for his 8AM.

Throughout the whole day, Neil’s mind keeps straying back to Palmetto’s, something like nerves or anticipation low in his stomach. He’s scheduled to work from 5 to close tonight, which Wymack had told him could be anywhere between 9 and midnight depending on how busy the restaurant is. He wonders if he’s going to be working with Dan, the kind woman who had seemed excited to meet him last night, or if he would be working with another one of Aaron’s friends. He’s mentioned a Matt and an Allison on a few occasion, as well as a rare Nicky—who Neil knows is his cousin—or Kevin, and even a Roland or a Renee every once in a while. Probably a few others, too.

Neil doesn’t know what to expect. As a teenager, he had unsurprisingly never been allowed a job. When his father was alive, it was _lay low, stay safe,_ and when he and his mother had been under Witness Protection, it had still been too dangerous for his mother to allow him to do something so independent.

In London with Stuart, Neil had been drifting. For his gap year, he hadn’t been traveling or making new experiences like everyone else, but rather laying around Stuart’s enormous house and trying to bring himself to feel anything other than contentment and anger for his father for taking his mother away from him—and subsequently all of the other people in his life he had cared about—as a last-ditch _fuck you_ effort from beyond the grave.

He wonders, not for the first time, if he will see Kevin again. Apparently he’s a lot less involved here than Neil had thought him to be, though Neil is sure he does still work for Palmetto’s to some degree. He wonders if Kevin is going to want to talk to him again after all that had happened. Wonders if Kevin has even noticed anything is off between him and Jean. It hadn’t seemed like it from the casual nature of his texts to Neil, but that could have just been due to Kevin’s incredible lack of tact.

Neil wonders what Jean is doing nowadays. Over their—very brief—phone call, Jean had told Neil about his semi-new job at the library. Apparently he’s made a new friend in the form of the children’s section librarian, and Jean had brought him up far too many times in that 10-minute call for it to be anything less than an enormous crush. It’s something Neil would have teased him about had things been less strained between them.

That being said, Neil knows next to nothing about Jean’s current life. Doesn’t know how often he and Kevin still hang out, or what classes he’s taking this year in college. He probably knows less about his former best friend than his former best friend’s current fleeting crush, and he tries not to let that sting too badly.

Neil arrives at Palmetto’s at five minutes to five and is pleased to note that the restaurant is mostly empty. He lets himself in the back entrance, using the key Wymack had given him despite also have in memorized the code to the door, pushing his way through and locking it back up behind him.

The kitchen is much more bustling than it had been the only other time he’d been in it. Before, the room had felt warm and open and it had been inhabited by only Andrew, looking ruffled and half-asleep over pots of stew. Now Andrew resides in the far right of the room near the ovens, both feet firmly on the ground and peering in through the foggy glass. Behind him stands Kevin Day, who is scowling into the ovens over Andrew’s shoulder.

Neil fights back the feeling that begins to swoop in his stomach at the sight of Kevin in front of him again after so long, something like panic or nostalgia or uncertainty. He wanders closer to the pair, aiming for casual when he says, “This seems like an important operation.”

Immediately, Kevin turns on him, startling at the new voice in the room. Andrew, on the other hand, just glances in Neil’s direction with a quirk of his brow before returning to staring at the oven. Neil hides his smile in his shoulder at the concerned look on Andrew’s face. His eyebrows are scrunched together tightly in a way that makes Neil want to smooth them out, and he’s once again struck by how different Andrew looks from his twin at any given time.

Kevin clears his throat, and Neil turns his attention back onto the taller man, raising his eyebrows when he sees the hand he’s outstretched between them. “Really, Kevin?” Neil asks.

Kevin’s shoulders are tense in that way they’d always gotten before a particularly stressful exam, and Neil frowns, wondering what the man is so worried about over his presence. “Um,” Kevin says, eloquently, and then he doesn’t elaborate further.

“Uh huh,” Neil draws, coming closer to Andrew. “I don’t know where to go,” he admits to him, trying to get a good look into the oven to see what the blonde is frowning about.

Andrew doesn’t look at him, shuffling closer still to the oven until Neil has to fight the urge to push him away from the heat of it. “Allison will come get you when she’s ready,” Andrew says distractedly. “She’s probably trying to weasel a bigger tip out of the golfers at table six. Matt will start your training as soon as you guys switch off.”

Neil hums again, relaxing a bit now that he knows he’s not supposed to be somewhere different. He steps closer to the oven, and Andrew makes way for him easily, moving out of Neil’s direct line of sight until Neil has a clear view of a bubbling monstrosity through the glass. “What’s going on here?”

Kevin comes back up behind them, wringing his hands nervously. “Kevin overfilled the lasagna,” Andrew says, tone vitriol. “We have to watch it to make sure it doesn’t bubble over and force me to clean the oven again.”

Neil tilts his head. “Can’t you just take it out of the oven for a few minutes to drain some of the… juices?”

Both men swing their heads to him incredulously.

“Take it out of the—”

“Drain the juices—”

The rest of their responses are cut off when the kitchen doors swing open, thankfully saving Neil from being scolded on whatever food crimes he’d just suggested they commit, and in strides a tall blonde woman in a black button-down shirt artfully unbuttoned at the top and tight black slacks that don’t seem to leave any room at all. Her hair falls over her shoulders in a way that is so perfect it can’t be natural and she’s wearing short black heels.

“Boys,” she greets, immediately propping her hip against the kitchen island and finding a small tablet one of the overhead cabinets, her manicured nails tapping loudly against the screen of it as she types.

Finally, she turns to Neil. “You must be the new kid,” she says, her voice sharp. “Do you know how to work the tablets? Matt should be in to help you any minute now.”

Neil shakes his head, surprised by her genuine words. Allison smiles at him widely, hunching over the tablet as she shows Neil how to use it to clock in and out, briefly explaining how he would use it to mark down orders as well but assuring him that Matt will show him in more detail when he arrives. Neil thanks her quietly, and she smiles again, wide and full of perfectly white teeth. Everything about her should seem fake, but somehow Neil can tell by her smile that she is anything but.

By the time a large, looming man finally bursts through the kitchen doors with a huff, Allison has bullied him into handing over his phone so she can put her and the rest of the staff’s contact information in. She had hummed approvingly when she had seen the model of Neil’s phone, but Neil hadn’t had to hear to tell her that he only had it because of his uncle’s insistence and didn’t actually know how to work any of it aside from the text and call features.

She leaves with a flourish when Matt finally comes in to take over, and she waves her hand at Neil on her way out, calling out a quick goodbye to Kevin and Andrew as well and rolling her eyes when neither of them look away from the oven and simply grunt at her.

Matt is a towering man with curly hair and thick arms that remind him of Andrew’s, and he is wearing the biggest smile Neil has ever seen a human wear. “You must be Neil,” he greets, looking like he might actually try to hug him before stopping short as Neil shrinks away and Andrew clears his throat pointedly for some reason. He holds out his hand instead, smiling sheepishly as Neil gingerly shakes it.

“You shook _his_ hand,” Neil hears Kevin mutter from a few feet away.

Neil rolls his eyes, feeling almost light with how easy it still is to banter with Kevin. He especially likes that it seems like they’re simply not going to talk about Riko or any of the other things that drove them apart. Neil likes to act like things never happened. Still though… “Yes, Kevin,” Neil says, “shaking hands is an appropriate way to greet someone you’ve never met before.”

Matt looks between them curiously before asking, “Are you ready to start your training?”

Neil nods, letting Matt guide him out of the kitchen and into the main dining area. Just before the kitchen doors swing shut, Neil hears an aggressive sizzle from the ovens, followed by a loud bang and Andrew’s voice shouting, “ _Goddamnit_ Kevin.”

Matt shakes his head fondly, and Neil has to hide his smile in the bump of his shoulder. The larger man guides Neil through a few tables, having him take the stumbling orders of a few tables with him by his side until he tells Neil to try it on his own. It’s a lot less intimidating than it had seemed, and before Neil knows it minutes have melted into hours and the sun is slipping from the sky. Matt’s idle chatter helps the time between tables pass easily, and Neil finds himself actually enjoying the pattern of taking orders, serving food, and talking with Matt.

Neil actually gets a chance to talk to the dark-haired bartender for a few minutes while the man sets up, alone this time. He learns that the man’s name is Roland and that the female bartender’s name is Renee, and Neil sits on a stool in the quiet of the evening and listens to Matt and Roland talk until the dinner rush sets in and the three of them are forced to actually do their jobs.

Matt leaves Neil to his own devices to tend to a table in the far corner of the room, and Neil does well with the two tables he’d been given, easily carting trays to and from the kitchen, trying not to smile when he arrives in the kitchen and spots Kevin wiping the interior of the oven as Andrew loads up his tray. Everything seems to be going smoothly.

That is, until the dinner rush trickles out completely and only the bar patrons and those drinking at the tables remain. The last time Neil had gone into the kitchen it had been in order to get to the employee bathrooms, and Andrew and Kevin had been cleaning up for the night.

Currently, Andrew sits on a bar stool next to Neil, who had just cleared his last table for the night. Matt flits around the last table now, clearing their plates and bringing them into the kitchen for Kevin to wash up. Roland chatters on happily to the bar patrons, casually dropping hints that it _is_ passed closing time and he _does_ want to go home eventually. 

Most of them seem to get the memo and start to make promises about _one last drink_ and _let me call an Uber._ Only one man, however, doesn’t show any signs of leaving. He’s been staring at Neil for as long as he’s been sitting at the bar, ignoring the glares Andrew sends him and the confused, uncomfortable, and vaguely threatening looks Neil fixes him with.

When Roland is deep in conversation with a woman at the other end of the bar, the man shuffles closer until Neil is trapped between him and Andrew, who leans back to give Neil more space. “Hey, cutie,” the man says, his voice slurred and his breath smelling thickly of alcohol.

Neil recoils. He has never really been a fan of substances, a preference drilled into him both by his experiences as a child and by his mother. Nathen Wesninski hadn’t been a regular drinker, but when he had drunk, he had given Neil some of his worse scars and delivered his mother the hit with the blunt of his ax that had led to her violent heart condition and eventual death. His men hadn’t been much better, and he remembers the scent of beer on Lola’s breath on many occasions.

Even when Nathan was killed and Neil and his mother were put in WITSEC, Mary hadn’t ever allowed him—or herself—to do anything more than smoke an occasional cigarette on the fire escape.

Needless to say Neil doesn’t drink, and doesn’t particularly like it when wasted strangers get in his space.

When Neil ignores the man, instead turning towards Andrew, who is leveling the man with a death stare, the man barks out a, “Hey! I’m talking to you,” and grabs Neil’s wrist. Beside him, Andrew hops off his stool immediately, but before the other man can do anything more, Neil has the man on the alcohol-sticky floor under the bar with his foot on the man’s chest and the pointy leg of the barstool he’d been sitting on at his throat.

Around them, everything goes still. Roland and the other bar patrons are shouting, Matt and Kevin are rushing out of the kitchen, and Andrew is snapping a hand in front of his face. Blindly, Neil shakes his head, hastily placing the barstool back to the floor and rushing to his feet so fast he gets a head rush. He makes his way past Kevin and Matt, mumbling something about _break_ as he pushes through the kitchen doors, not stopping until he’s back through the kitchen doors and in the night air.

Neil glances around the lamp lit area, pebbles clicking under his shoes as he walks the few more steps to the bench, plopping himself down unceremoniously, dropping his head into his hands.

The back door opens again a few minutes later, and Neil raises his head to see Andrew walking towards him, shadowy and stark against the glow from the streetlights. “Can I sit?”

Neil nods, gesturing vaguely to the spot on the bench beside him, listening Andrew arrange himself carefully on the seat, followed by the _snick_ of a lighter and the smell of cigarette smoke he’d nearly forgotten the smell of.

They’re silent for a few moments, only the light brushes of wind and the sound of the wind-chimes hung from the roof penetrating the quiet between them.

“You don’t like people touching you,” Andrew states finally, his breath curling out into the night air between them.

“Neither do you,” Neil shoots back quickly, not missing the way the blonde’s eyebrow quirks from the observation.

“It’s not a competition,” says Andrew, and the fight drains out of Neil’s body entirely. He hunches his shoulders, trying not to remember the way that man’s hand around his wrist had felt so similar to being dragged along by his father as a child.

“Neil,” comes Andrew’s voice from above him again, low and rumbly. “Because I am pretty much in charge here I need to ask you a question, and I need you to not be upset about it.”

Neil makes a vague _go on_ gesture, but Andrew doesn’t say anything until Neil lets out a tired, “Yes, okay. What is it?”

“Do you think you are going to be able to handle this?”

The implication is clear, but Neil can’t help but catch the double-meaning anyways. Andrew means _Do you think you can handle this job?_ but Neil hears _Do you think you can handle this life?_ just as clearly.

He doesn’t know the answer either way. At the beginning of his shift, he had been stifling laughs in the kitchen as he watched his ex-friend and Andrew watch over an overflowing lasagna like a pair of hawks. He had met Allison, Matt, and Roland and he hadn’t felt the need to lie to them once. He had done his job well and done almost everything right.

And still, all it had taken was one handsy asshole to bring his near-perfect day crumbling down around him.

Neil isn’t fragile by any means, but he doesn’t want to have to be deadly anymore. He doesn’t want to worry about zoning out and accidentally nearly decapitating a man. He doesn’t want to worry about that man in the first place. Doesn’t want to worry about a lot of things.

To Andrew, he says, “I don’t know,” and lets Andrew sit with that.

“Okay,” Andrew allows, standing up from their bench, offering Neil an outstretched hand. “You can keep trying for now, and you will let me know if you decide you can’t at any time.”

Neil nods, says, “Okay,” and takes Andrew’s hand, letting the man pull him to his feet.

Andrew doesn’t let go of his hand right away, instead pulling him along gently to the parking lot, where a sleek, matte black car beeps when Andrew presses something on his keys. “I already signed us out, Josten, don’t worry. And I know you didn’t think you were going to walk back to your apartment at 11PM.”

Neil huffs a sigh, but he slides into the passenger’s seat anyway, letting his head fall back against the headrest as Andrew starts the car, warm air brushing his hair out of his face almost immediately, defrosting his chilly nose and hands. Neil wants to tell Andrew to fuck off. Wants to tell him he can take care of himself. Wants to tell him a lot of things. “Thank you,” is what comes out instead, and Andrew cuts him a glance from the corner of his eye as he turns out of the parking lot.

The drive to Aaron and Neil’s apartment is quick and silent, and Neil lets himself relax into the seats and listen to the gentle click of the car engine, watching Andrew’s side profile ceaselessly, cataloging the minute ticks of his jaw and the slow blink of his eyelashes against his cheeks, wondering if his skin is as soft as it looks.

Andrew parallel parks easily and perfectly in front of Neil’s building, and Neil is begrudgingly impressed, giving the blonde a little wave as he exits the car, feeling Andrew’s gaze on his back as he puts in the code for the door and up until he closes it behind him.

Neil trudges up the stairs until he reaches his apartment, letting himself inside and pausing in the doorway, hearing Aaron’s snores already. Neil’s stomach is growling, but Neil is too exhausted to even think about eating, so he makes his way straight to his room and undresses to his boxers, flopping down on his bed and listening to Aaron’s soft snores from the other room.

He wonders fleetingly if Andrew snores, rolls his eyes at himself, gets comfortable, and falls asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhhh things are starting to happen!! The next chapter is one of my favorites so I’m already sitting impatiently for next Wednesday haha
> 
> Thank you for reading!!
> 
> comments are hugely appreciated :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> eeeee this is one of my favorite chapters!!!!

Working at Palmetto’s is going almost worryingly well. Neil hasn’t spilled a drink in over a week and he’s finally started to get used to the strange tablets enough so that he can consistently send food orders to the kitchen without accidentally calling the fire department. He finds himself actually enjoying the atmosphere the restaurant creates, and the few shitty customers he does encounter he manages to deal with without nearly decapitating them.

Neil has never had a routine. When he was young, he would stay inside when his father was away and stay out of the house when his father was in it—sporadic and desperate for escape. For Neil’s high school years, his schedule hadn’t improved. He had hung out with Kevin and Jean and tried to stay as far away from Riko as possible. He had made dinner for his mother when she couldn’t bear to get out of bed and sat by her side when she was in and out of the hospital. With Stuart, it had been a lot of doing nothing much at all, which he couldn’t say he had hated.

Even in his Freshman year of college Neil had been flitting from place to place. He had gone to classes and tried to avoid Jean and Kevin at all times. He had met Aaron and started to remember what it was like to have a friend. He had stumbled through life, clumsy and distrusting, but it had been the best year of his life nonetheless.

Now though, Neil finally has that routine. He gets up in the morning and checks his schedule which has been immortalized in the form of a Walmart whiteboard he and Aaron had up on the fridge. He goes to classes, does homework, talks to Aaron, and now he goes to work at Palmetto’s. Andrew has taken to driving Neil home on the days he works past nightfall.

As for Andrew, something had changed between them when Neil hadn’t been paying attention. Aside from driving Neil home, since Neil’s first day at Palmetto’s, his tentative friendship with Andrew has seemed to bloom. Andrew has almost forgone his outward indifference towards Neil entirely. He talks more. Tells Neil stories about Wymack being a terrible business-owner and explains to him in great detail what he would do in the event of a zombie apocalypse. He keeps the passenger-side seat-warmer flicked on for Neil, and he offers him bites of strawberries and cream when he makes shortcakes in the kitchen.

Another thing worth noting is that Neil now has more contacts in his phone than people he’s spoken to voluntarily in his whole life. Not even a day after Neil had reluctantly given Allison his phone number, he had been inducted into the most terrifying group chat he had ever been in, which is somehow both not saying much and saying a _lot,_ since the only other group chat he has ever been in was with Kevin, Jean, and Riko.

It’s called _The Palmetto Bitches._ A play on words that stems from the Bistro’s actual name, Neil supposes, but he doesn’t like it enough to try to understand it beyond that. It includes the servers (Dan, Matt, Neil, Allison and Nicky), the chefs (Andrew, Kevin, and Erik), the bartenders (Renee, Roland, and Seth), and Aaron (for some reason). It’s a hellscape, and he’d made Aaron mute it for him after the first five minutes of being added to it.

It does somehow make a regular appearance in his everyday routine though, if only because people start yelling at him one-on-one if he doesn’t contribute to conversation enough.

Over the last two weeks, Neil has had at least one conversation with every single one of Palmetto’s employees—each with varying degrees of success.

None of them are threats to Neil—though Seth likes to teasingly pretend he is—and he honestly has a hard time dealing with that. Their brand of kindness is almost foreign to Neil, complete and honest. He doesn’t deserve it, and he doesn’t have the slightest clue about what he’s supposed to do with it. He’s used to Aaron’s friendship, easy and teasing and more than Neil could have ever hoped for, but Aaron is just one man.

Today, Neil is working a day shift, and he, Matt, and Dan are the only ones in the whole seating area. Dan isn’t even scheduled for today, and it’s the first time Neil has ever seen her—or any of his co-workers—in any colors other than black. She’s sitting on top of the vacant bar facing the room, and Matt sits happily on one of the bar stools with his head resting against her thigh as she cards through his hair. Neil supposes they’re dating.

That’s another thing Neil has been confused about as of late; the dynamics between his co-workers. Matt and Dan are obviously together, but Neil gets lost after that fact. Allison is always at the bar when she has time to sit, and she seems to spread her attention between Renee and Seth evenly, seeming more than friendly with either one of them on any given day. Nicky and Erik are doing a strange sort of dance around each other, and Neil always catches Andrew rolling his eyes at them when they interact. Kevin is Wymack’s father, but Wymack treats Andrew almost like a son as well. Andrew treats Kevin like an annoying dog that is chewing constantly on his pant leg.

It only gets worse from there though, because Andrew _also_ spends a lot of time at the bar when they’re slow. He talks to Renee a lot too, though he never gets the same gleam in his eye as Allison does, and he talks to Roland almost as much. Sometimes, Andrew will give Roland or Renee a ride home as well when he drives Neil, though he doesn’t let either of them take the front seat.

Not to mention he still hasn’t said a word to Kevin about anything regarding their shared pasts, and Kevin hasn’t brought it up either. The other man is so good at pushing things back that Neil would probably think he’d forgotten about him entirely if he didn’t know better. Kevin talks about Jean a lot, but he doesn’t bring up high school, or Riko, or Neil.

It’s confusing. It feels like more than Neil has ever had to pay attention to in his whole life.

It only gets more confusing, though, when he tunes back into his conversation with Matt and Dan and hears Matt say, “Will you go on a date with us?”

“Um,” Neil says, mind fuzzy as he sips on the juice box he’d stolen from the kid’s fridge in the kitchen. “What?”

Dan rolls her eyes at him, squishing Matt’s cheek between two fingers where it’s still resting on her thigh. “What Matt _meant_ ,” she begins, “is that we want to get to know you better. Are you free to grab an early dinner after your guy’s shifts end?”

“Not that we don’t _want_ to date you,” Matt adds on, but Dan pinches his lips together with an apologetic smile, causing Matt to mumble the rest of his sentence.

“Oh,” Neil says, honestly surprised. He can’t remember the last time he’s gotten dinner with someone other than Aaron—or, really, gone anywhere with someone other than Aaron. Neil’s first instinct is to decline. He still feels sleepy thanks to the 10AM nap he had taken before work, and he kind of just wants to go home and watch the discovery channel with Aaron, but the hopeful looks on his co-workers’ faces gives him pause. “Okay,” he says finally.

They both beam at his with matching toothy smiles, and Neil feels a smile bubble up within himself at the sight of them.

An hour or so later and a declined offer for a ride home from Andrew finds Neil, Dan, and Matt at a mall food court. Matt drags him along to find a table as Dan orders them a pizza, and the only open seats are at a table directly across from an arcade.

The sounds of racking coins and exaggerated electronic gunshots flood his ears, and he finds himself looking over against his will. Immediately, neon lights burn his eyes, vision blurring and doubling. There are children crawling over every inch of the arcade, and Neil can’t even begin to imagine how many germs must be on those claw machine controls, but he can’t bring himself to look away.

Neil had been deprived of many things in his childhood that may seem like a staple to most. Neil’s father had never taken him fishing. His mother had never brought him to the mall food court for shitty pizza and neon lights. He’d never gone mini-golfing with his uncle, though Neil thinks vaguely that Stuart would be down for that if Neil proposed the idea now.

Matt follows his stare easily and grins, finally pulling Neil’s attention back to the present. “Dan and I have a bunch of ticket receipts saved up,” he says. “We only need two thousand more tickets until we can win that glorious thing.” He points a finger back into the arcade, and Neil follows it to the far-right wall of it where a bored-looking teenager sits behind the cash register, popping gum. The wall behind the teen is filled to bursting with strange-looking children’s toys. Neil spots a bucket of candy, some small animal figurines, and a blow-up electric guitar, but what Matt is pointing at takes up the majority of the wall.

It’s an enormous, plush, round ball with the face and tail of a fox. Neil stares at it for a second, and it seems to stare right back, begging for Neil to save it from a life of being pinned to a cork board and forced to watch screaming children waste their parent’s money. Neil pities it. “Huh,” he says, and Matt nods solemnly.

A minute or two later, Dan comes up behind Matt, dropping the pizza-filled tray in front of him with a clatter and kissing him on the head. Matt just leans him head back and smiles at her fondly, and Neil tries not to think about how he would have given her a black eye for sneaking up on him like that.

The pizza is terribly wonderful, and the three of them devour two mediums in less than ten minutes. Matt picks his onions off of his slices and puts them on Dan’s plate, and he also steals the mushrooms and peppers off of Neil’s own plate from where he’d been piling them up on the side of it. It feels strangely practiced. Like a scene from a movie, or something that only comes naturally after years of work. Neil feels unworthy somehow, and his skin feels greasy and too-tight around his body.

When they’re done and Matt goes to clear their plates and tray, Dan pulls her wallet out from her back pocket. She slides a thick stack of small receipts from a secret compartment Neil hadn’t noticed, spreading them out across the table like a war plan, trying in vain to stop them from curling up around the edges.

Dan pulls out her phone, opening the calculator app and instructing Neil to go through and read the numbers off for her. He does, and they’re on the last number when Matt shows back up and bumps into Dan’s arm, causing her to miss a button on the calculator. The glare Dan sends him has even Neil shivering slightly, and Matt looks on at them vaguely like a kicked puppy from the next table over until the number is successfully calculated and Dan gives him a kiss on the cheek.

“Okay,” Dan says, scribbling out a number on the back of the receipt. “We are winning that ginormous fox plushie today.” Dan falls into a voice Neil has only heard from her when she’s scolding someone at the restaurant; authoritative and entirely out of place in the middle of a mall food court. “It’s been there for _months_ and if we are close to getting it others must be too. We need to work fast.” She stands up, and Matt and Neil follow her lead. “Matt,” she continues, “you know the drill. You do the strength ones and the claw machines and I’ll do the timing ones. Neil,” she turns to him, her eyes bright. “Would you say you’re better at shooting games or air hockey?”

“Uh,” Neil says, following the other two in a daze as they make their way towards the arcade like a troupe marching into battle. “Shooting games.”

Not a minute later Neil has been handed two pocket-fulls of coins and he’s sitting at a two-person shooter game. In the corner, Neil can see Matt slamming a mallet down in front of a small army of 5 year-olds, their tiny mouths dropping open when the bar goes all the way to the top. Neil shakes his head, trying to figure out how to start his own game.

The flashing words on the screen tell Neil he needs to insert four tokens. He grabs them from his pocket and searches around the base of the machine until he finds a slot, sliding the tokens in one at a time. Neil looks up expectingly, waiting for the game to start, but the words _Insert one more token_ keeps flashing on the screen. Neil frowns. He _knows_ he put in four tokens, and he’s not about to let this machine take Dan and Matt’s hard-earned money. He glances around, wondering if there’s a protocol for this kind of thing. Neil tries to press the start button, and when that doesn’t work, he kicks the side of the machine hard.

“Having trouble?” comes a familiar amused voice from behind him.

Neil turns, straightening back into a sitting position and coming face to face with Andrew, who is leaning casually against the second seat of the machine, his lips quirked up to the side. “No,” Neil says, his leg still paused in the air mid-kick.

“Uh huh,” Andrew hums noncommittally, reaching down to the machine and pressing a glowing orange button. Immediately, all four of Neil’s tokens fall back out, along with two extras. Neil looks at Andrew, who raises an eyebrow. “I guess kicking it did some good after all,” he admits, and Neil has to hide his grin.

Neil and Andrew play the two-person shooter together, and Neil doesn’t even pay attention to the tickets spewing out every few minutes, concentrating on mashing Andrew’s game avatar into a bloody pulp. He succeeds, too, since by the end of their session Neil has ten more tickets than Andrew does.

That being said, Neil had only earned 20 tickets from that whole game, and that doesn’t seem worth it at all.

Andrew and Neil are wandering around the arcade for a new game to play when Matt and Dan find them, both of them looking out of breath and a little sweaty. Dan says, “500 between the two of us,” before she notices Andrew at Neil’s side. “What are you doing here?”

Andrew grins, “Same thing as you, Wilds,” he says, and then he points up at the fox plushie.

Matt gasps, affronted, “There’s no way you have anywhere _close_ to what we have so far,” he says.

Andrew shrugs, “I’m only 1500 tickets away,” he says.

Dan’s shoulders tense, and she says, “Well, us too. And there’s no way you can beat the three of us all by yourself.”

Andrew just shrugs again, “Renee is waiting for me,” he says. “Giving me her faith and power and all that shit. I guess we’ll just have to see.” He motions vaguely back into the dining area, where Renee is sitting in a massage chair and reading a book like any other mother waiting for her son to finish up in the arcade.

Dan’s shoulders tense, but she looks more determined than frightened. “Bring it on Minyard,” she says, raising her fist. Andrew meets it with a bored look on his face, and they both make fake explosion sounds with a vast difference in excitement.

They split up again, but Andrew seems to be in Neil’s line of sight no matter where in the arcade he is. Neil watches him do the mallet thing he’d seen Matt do earlier, lifting the hammer over his head with a flex of his biceps, a bead of sweat rolling down his face before he brings it down swiftly. The bar overfills dramatically and tickets spew out violently from the machine.

On the other side of the room, he sees Andrew drop token after token down a slide at the perfect time. Neil comes up behind him curiously to watch, feeling vaguely light headed as Andrew hits the 150 ticket jackpot 15 times consecutively. Andrew smirks at him over his shoulder when he gets bored of this, and the feeling only intensifies.

Andrew wonders off towards the basketball game despite having just gotten far more tickets than he’d told Dan he needed, and Neil shrugs, following him. It turns out that they both have fantastic hand-eye coordination, because the only time either of them miss a basket is when one of them accidentally—or purposefully—hits the other’s basketball out of the way with their own.

Neil destroys Andrew at skee-ball, and Andrew wins something from the claw machine every single time. By the time Matt and Dan are rushing their way over to Neil, he’s laden down with three stuffed frogs of varying colors, two small plastic cow figurines, and a cheap necklace.

Andrew wanders off again while Matt and Dan frantically begin to feed their combined tickets into the counter, and Neil watches him go with a grin, turning back to help his… friends.

Dan rips the last receipt from the machine, turning towards the counter and nearly running face first into Andrew, who is sucking on a lollipop and holding the enormous fox plushie in his hands with some difficulty. He looks absolutely ridiculous in all black clothing and silver jewelry, hugging the fox plushie to his chest tightly.

Beside him, Matt gasps “ _No_ ,” and crumbles to his knees. Andrew gazes down at him emotionlessly, the fox’s tail poking him in the chin. It’s dumb little tongue is sticking out. Neil stifles a laugh.

Dan looks forlornly at the pile of devastated Matt on the floor in front of her and then grins, holding her hand out for Andrew to shake. “Well played, Minyard,” she says, laughing, “Well played.”

Andrew stares down at her hand, “How do I know you didn’t spit in that?”

Dan’s grin widens. “Just admit you don’t have enough hands to shake it.”

“I don’t have enough hands to shake it,” Andrew says.

“Foxy…” Matt whimpers from the floor.

Andrew pokes Matt with the toe of his boot. “Get up, Boyd,” he says, “They still got the fake electric guitar up there if you wanna keep saving.”

Matt looks up at him pitifully. “I guess,” he mutters. Dan pats his head sympathetically.

“Hey!” shouts the bored teen from behind the counter. “We have, like, three more of those in the back. Dolphin, shark, and cow.”

~

Matt and Dan collect their well-deserved winnings in the form of a huge cow plushie, and the four of them finally emerge from the arcade. Renee rises up from the massage chair to greet them, grinning at each of them in turn. She stretches her back, frowning. “Ouch,” she mutters.

Andrew glares at her. “I thought we agreed that more than 20 minutes on that thing is too much.”

Renee pouts. “I love massage chairs,” she sighs, leaning against Andrew’s shoulder easily after receiving a nod from the shorter man.

Not for the first time, Neil wonders what is going on between the two of them. Andrew, while he’s a lot less cold around Neil than he was those first few days, is still very particular about who he allows to touch him. But the way he and Renee lean their weight against one another has everything to do with easy, practiced trust. Neil balances the gifts Andrew had won him from the claw machines in his arms and tries to push down the bitter wish of Andrew taking some of _his_ weight instead.

When they reach the front entrance, Matt and Dan say their goodbyes to Andrew and Renee, Matt still holding his cow plushie to his chest in a death grip. Neil starts to follow them, since they’d driven him here in the first place, but Andrew catches the sleeve of his hoodie before he can get too far, holding his fox by the tail with one hand, careful not to touch Neil’s skin. “I can drive you,” he says. “Your apartment is on the way.”

Dan shrugs, wishing Neil goodbye and promising to see him tomorrow, and Matt crushes the cow plushie between them as he engulfs Neil in a hug.

Neil is pushed into the passengers seat of Andrew’s car unceremoniously, and Renee just grins into her shoulder when he looks to her in helpless apology. Neil drops his claw machine goodies into the circle of his legs as he sits criss-cross on the seat, and Andrew forces his fox in through the car door easily enough, dropping that in Neil’s lap as well.

The mall they had gone to had been a little ways out; about 20 minutes out from Palmetto’s, and Neil’s eyes begin to droop shut as soon as Andrew hits the highway. He hadn’t realized how exhausted he’d been until just now, and the whole day catches up to him in the span of a minute.

His head starts to grow pleasantly fuzzy. The car is blowing warm air onto him, and the quiet sounds of Andrew and Renee’s conversation fades into background noise. He lets his head lull forward until it’s resting comfortably on the fox plushie still in his lap, and he falls asleep thinking that he’s never felt more comfortable.

~

When Neil wakes, he’s still in the front seat of Andrew’s car. The world is silent and warm around him and the only noise is the rumble of the car engine and the soft patter of rain on the windshield. Neil opens his eyes without lifting his head up and he can see that they’re parked in the lot of his apartment complex and the sun is slipping from the sky. His arms are wrapped around the fox plushie and his face is still comfortably squished into it’s stomach.

Neil remains still for another few seconds, allowing himself a little bit of time to wake back up. When he finally lifts his head and looks around, he sees Andrew in the front seat, his chair pushed back and his feet up on either side of the steering wheel. He’s reading a book, and he’s recovered a large black sweatshirt from somewhere and bundled up into it. Renee isn’t in the back seat anymore, meaning Andrew must have already dropped her off. Neil frowns; he doesn’t know where Renee lives, but he knows that Neil is usually the one to get dropped off first.

Neil’s jaw pops loudly when he yawns, and Andrew glances over at the sound of it, his dark blonde eyebrows raised. He sets his book face-down on his chest and smirks at Neil. “I was starting to think you were just going to sleep through the night,” he says, and Neil scowls.

“You could’ve woken me up,” Neil grumbles, his voice rough from sleep. Already, he’s beginning to feel his eyes droop again, and he wiggles his face back into the fox plushie, facing Andrew and peering at him through a single, squinty eye.

“Obviously,” Andrew says. He taps the book on his chest, “I wanted to read anyways. It makes to difference to me whether or not I do that in my car or on my couch.”

Neil opens his mouth to respond, but before he can do so his phone starts buzzing violently in the center cup holder. Neil stares at it blankly for a second, and Andrew picks it up for him and hands it to him. Neil takes one look at the caller ID and puts the call on speakerphone, not willing to lift his head from its pillow just yet. “Hi Aaron,” he says, when the call connects.

“Where are you?” Aaron’s voice rings out into the mostly silent car. Andrew is staring at Neil’s phone with a contemplative look on his face, and Neil grins. It’s the same expression he’s seen Andrew wear before he insults Kevin or Roland; the same expression that he’d worn earlier today at the arcade. His instigator face, Neil thinks.

“Um,” Neil says, glancing at Andrew, who just gazes back silently. “I’m on the way back home now. Matt and Dan took me to the mall.”

“Voluntarily?” Neil can hear the frown in Aaron’s voice.

“Well,” Neil says, “no. But I had fun.”

Aaron sighs across the line. “Okay, well, hurry back. I want to try putting Old Bay on the popcorn tonight.”

Neil wrinkles his nose in thought, and he has to stifle a laugh at the horrified look on Andrew’s face. “Okay,” he says, “I’ll be back soon.”

“Don’t get hit by a car,” Aaron says.

“Yes, dear,” Neil teases, and Aaron huffs across the line.

He makes to hang up the phone, but before he can Andrew is raising his voice and asking, “Neil? Who’s that?”

Neil looks at him curiously, but the sounds of Aaron sputtering from across the line is enough for Neil to catch on. “Wha-” comes Aaron’s choked voice, and Neil hastily hangs up the phone, groaning into the fox plushie.

“Why would you do that?” Neil whines, removing his face after a moment and glaring at Andrew, who has picked his phone back up and is scrolling casually as if he didn’t just cause his brother to have a heart attack with only three words. It’s incredibly… something. Something Neil can’t quite grasp. Interesting, maybe; captivating. “He’s gonna be insufferable now.”

Andrew hums quietly, not looking at him. “Yeah,” he says, “Good luck.”

Neil rolls his eyes, sitting up straight in his seat and rolling his shoulders back. His spine pops a few times and Neil lets out a quiet groan to which Andrew raises an eyebrow while still looking down at his phone. He finally looks up when Neil opens the car door, rising to his feet and placing the fox plushie to replace him in the passengers seat. “Keep that thing,” Andrew says without inflection.

Neil frowns. “It’s yours.”

Andrew waves a hand dismissively. “I just got it because I wanted to one-up Dan and Matt. I just use my points to get candy.”

Neil looks down at the enormous fox’s stupid little face, and then up to Andrew again. “What am _I_ supposed to do with it?”

Andrew rolls his eyes, grabbing the plushie and leaning over the gearshift to shove it into Neil’s arms. “Keep it, throw it out, give it to my brother,” he lists uninterestedly, “I don’t care.”

“Okay,” Neil says quietly, hugging the plushie tightly. “Thank you for the ride. And for the fox.”

“Goodbye Neil,” Andrew says, starting up the car again, “see you tomorrow.”

Neil tries his best to use his body to shield the fox plushie from the rain, to no avail. The trek up the stairs feels particularly draining after the day Neil had just had, and his feet are sore from standing around doing nothing all day at work. He takes the short trip up to his apartment to reflect on his day, wondering where the sudden tightness in his stomach had come from.

He still doesn’t really understand why Aaron is so adverse to Neil and Andrew hanging out, but since their conversation the day before Neil’s first day at Palmetto’s, Aaron had been acting even more testily towards Andrew—and Neil by extension, which he does not appreciate.

Things aren’t _weird_ between them, per say, but they definitely don’t talk about Aaron’s brother more than is strictly necessary. When he does come up, Neil feels like he has to be careful about what he says, not wanting to piss Aaron off more than the mere mention of Andrew does on its own.

It’s confusing, and it’s far more complicated than things have ever been with Aaron.

When Neil finally lets himself into their apartment—holding the fox plushie by the tail as he unlocks the door—Aaron is passed out on the couch with a thick anatomy textbook sprawled open over his chest. The TV is switched off, and the only light comes from the small floor lamp in the corner that Aaron had found at a yard sale for eight dollars. Neil looks at his friend fondly. He must have fallen asleep as soon as he’d gotten off the phone with Neil, pushing his problems away with forced unconsciousness like a true college student.

Neil sneaks into his room and places his fox plushie and other spoils on his bed, making his way into the kitchen and grabbing himself a carton of leftover Thai noodles and chopsticks, heading back into the living room without warming them up. He perches himself on the arm of the couch near Aaron’s feet like a gremlin, eating his noodles cold straight from the carton, staring down at his unconscious roommate creepily in hopes Aaron will wake up and see him there—subsequently pissing his pants.

He doesn’t, unfortunately, and Neil throws his carton away before sitting directly on Aaron’s feet, causing his roommate to wake violently and look around, letting out an annoyed sigh when he spots Neil. “You’re back,” he says dryly, “that was fast. I think. I don’t remember falling asleep.”

“I was in the parking lot when you called,” Neil admits.

Aaron lulls his head until he’s facing the dark TV, pushing his textbook off his chest and placing in on the coffee table. “You said you were hanging out with Dan and Matt,” he says quietly.

Neil frowns. “I was,” he says, glaring when Aaron looks at him sarcastically. “I _was._ Andrew and Renee showed up randomly and he took me home. I wasn’t aware you were policing me.”

Aaron sits up abruptly, his leg kicking out. “I’m not,” he says seriously. “I don’t care what you do I just…” he lets out a frustrated breath. “I don’t know. I just thought you lied to me or something.”

“Well I didn’t,” Neil says, too sharply. He doesn’t know why this grates on him so much. He wouldn’t like it if Aaron had lied to him either, but he doesn’t appreciate not being believed nonetheless. Neil huffs out a breath. Complicated.

“Okay,” Aaron says, reaching towards the remote and switching on the TV. Neil doesn’t know why they bother paying for anything other than the nature channels, since it’s all they seem to watch. On screen, a baby polar bear sits on an iceberg and tries to catch fish with it’s tiny hands, coming up empty every time. It seems metaphorical somehow.

They watch the polar bear try to catch the fish in vain for twenty minutes with a man’s accented voice narrating the whole thing. Eventually, the polar bear’s mother arrives and catches the fish herself, and Neil takes that as his cue to go to bed, standing up from the couch and yawning into his shoulder. He gives Aaron a wave goodnight, but he stops with one foot inside his bedroom door when he hears Aaron begin to speak.

“What?” Neil asks quietly, not willing to break himself from the hazy daze of sleepiness.

“Just…” Aaron starts, trailing off. “Just promise me you won’t date my brother, Josten.”

Something unfurls in Neil’s stomach at the suggestion. He doesn’t think he’s ever done anything that would allude to him wanting to date Andrew, and Aaron knows better than anyone—aside from Jean—about Neil’s general lack of interest in the dating pool. His mind is too fuzzy to think too hard about it now, though, so he just says “Of course not,” and takes another step into his room. “I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you guys enjoyed this chapter!!! we have the first bit of conflict coming up over the horizon
> 
> also!!! if you plan on leaving a comment do let me know when you think the best time of day for me to update is because i’m indecisive lolol (i’m usa est time)
> 
> comments fuel me!! :)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hiiiiiii here’s chapter four

Aaron flops onto the couch miserably, letting out a long groan that sounds more like a muffled scream. Neil frowns, placing his peanut butter and banana rice cake on the coffee table next to his abandoned cup of coffee. He gazes down on Aaron curiously, jabbing the back of his calf with two fingers and making Aaron kick his leg blindly behind him. Aaron groans again, this time more pointedly, and Neil grins. “Oh yeah?” Neil asks conversationally.

Aaron remains face-down in the couch cushions long enough for Neil to eat the remainder of his breakfast before he’s finally pushing himself up onto his elbows, facing away from Neil. “I don’t know what to _do,_ ” he whines, and Neil chuckles at his dramatics. This could be about anything, really, but Neil is pretty certain this bout of emotion from Aaron has something to do with Katelyn.

“Care to expand on that?” Neil asks, hiding his grin into his near-empty coffee mug when Aaron swivels around to glare at him, sitting correctly on the couch finally.

Aaron sighs, picking at a few loose strands of thread on his shirtsleeve, and Neil kicks his hand away before he can unravel the whole thing. “Katelyn and I were talking like… all night last night,” he starts, and Neil actually raises an eyebrow. The day Katelyn had asked Aaron for his number, Neil had worked a double shift, and Aaron had stayed up until 1AM on a Thursday to tell him about it. Still though, Neil didn’t know Aaron had been brave enough to actually _call_ her, though he supposes Katelyn could have initiated that as well for some reason Neil will never understand. He has a hard enough time dealing with Aaron as things are, and he can’t imagine voluntarily talking to him throughout the night, though he supposes that’s true with everyone Neil knows.

 _Almost everyone,_ his mind supplies him unhelpfully, bringing up the memory of a different blonde head of hair and freckled cheeks. Neil pushes that thought down to deal with later—or not.

To his side, Aaron continues his story. “—and I really want to ask her on a date but I don’t know how to do that,” he huffs miserably, turning his face towards Neil. Now that Neil can see Aaron’s face properly, he can make out the smudges of dark circles under his eyes that look more prominent.

Neil shakes his head at his friend’s antics. “Why don’t you just ask her then?” Neil asks, enjoying the incredulous look Aaron sends him for that.

“It’s not that easy,” he says, looking like he wants to smoosh his face right back into the cushions.

Neil shrugs unhelpfully, standing as he grabs his coffee mug from the table, dropping it in the sink for someone to deal with later. “It _could_ be that easy, theoretically,” Neil retorts.

From the couch, Aaron lets out a deep gust of a sigh, looking almost considering. Neil leans against the half-wall separating the kitchen from the living room, waiting. Neil had turned on National Geographic before Aaron had emerged from his room, and the room is silent for a few minutes aside from the soft voice of the narrator explaining the path of a highland bird.

Eventually, when the screen has changed from baby birds learning how to fly to an owl with its head cocked to the side, Aaron speaks. “I know you might not understand, considering your…thing,” he starts. Aaron had offered to help Neil figure out his sexuality a little better in their Freshman year of college, and he had done some research for him, but Neil has never really felt the need to label anything. He sometimes still prefers to float through life rather than know his place, and this feels like a safe enough area to do so.

“But,” Aaron continues, “I really, really, like her. Katelyn.”

Neil squints his eyes at his friend slightly, suspicious now. Aaron sounds genuine and almost helpless—meaning he definitely wants something from him. Still though, Neil doesn’t push, and he asks a question that’s been nagging at him for a while now. “How do you know? That you like her?”

A small smile crosses Aaron’s face. “She’s smart, and she’s funny, and she’s beautiful,” he begins to list, and Neil wonders if he’s starting to regret asking. “When she’s in the room with me it’s like I don’t want to look at anyone else, and she makes me happy when I talk to her.” Aaron pauses, “That’s really all I need, I think. To know I like her. I could talk to her for hours without loosing interest.”

Neil feels a little nauseous after all the gross _emotion_ Aaron has just spewed all over him, but he’s starting to feel a little lightheaded as well. He thinks about Dan and Matt, and their easy conversation and touches, the way they seem to gravitate towards each other whenever they’re in the same room. Thinks about how Aaron always seems to be thinking of Katelyn. Even the way Erik and Nicky work around each other at the restaurant , or how Allison and Seth are always looking at each other from across the room. About the easy way Renee and Andrew support each other’s weight.

It’s strange to think about, like his skin is too big for his body when he imagines his friends and their devotions to one another. He feels out of place among those easy relationships, platonic or otherwise, and at the thought of Andrew and Renee, his stomach curls up a little around the edges.

Presently, Aaron is still staring at him in that nearly-pleading way. “I _really_ want to ask her on a date,” he says pointedly, and Neil sighs.

“What do you want from _me_?”

Aaron sits up straighter on the couch, muting the National Geographic channel despite Neil’s protests. “We are going to meet up later today at the library,” he says, “you should come with me. For moral support.”

“Moral support,” Neil deadpans. He’s skeptical.

“Yes,” Aaron says.

Neil wrinkles his nose. “Why would I want to be around all of your weird emotional shit?”

“Because you’re my best friend and I asked you to?” Aaron tries.

Neil imagines Aaron tripping over himself for Katelyn and wonders if the entertainment value of it would be worth the overall experience. Probably not, considering Neil has a hard time sitting still when Aaron simply _talks_ about the girl. It’s got to be ten times worse having to actually witness it. Neil coughs unconvincingly. “I’m sick,” he says, “I can’t go.”

Aaron rolls his eyes. “We are meeting at noon, so be ready.”

“You would let the supposed love of your life get sick?”

Aaron grins. “You or Katelyn?”

Neil shoves him, heading into his room to contemplate his choices—and to get ready for his ‘date’.

He already knows it’s going to be awful.

~

They make their way down to the Palmetto University library at 11:30, and Neil had been able to bully Aaron out of yet another graphic tee with a biology pun on it despite his friend’s insistence that Katelyn is a wonderful person who appreciates his style unlike _someone he knows._ Neil had asked him if he wanted Katelyn to remember first being asked on a date by Aaron wearing that outfit, and Aaron had changed without further complaint after that.

On the walk down, Aaron complains about Neil’s own sense of style while also fiddling nervously with the belt loop of his jeans. “I can’t believe you always try to dress me when you literally used to own two outfits.”

Neil grins. “You never actually saw me in that point of my life. You know Stuart bullied me into a real wardrobe years ago.”

Aaron scuffs his shoe on the sidewalk as he tries to kick a rock. “Doesn’t mean you’re better than me,” he mumbles, and Neil grins.

“I didn’t say anything of the sort,” he teases, “something on _your_ mind, Aaron?”

“No,” grumps Aaron, shoving his shoulder lightly.

The rest of their trip is silent, and when they get to the library, a girl is waiting for them on the front steps. Or rather, waiting for Aaron, since she didn’t actually know Neil was going to be there.

She’s pretty, Neil supposes, if he really cared about that kind of thing. She’s tan with wavy brunette hair, and Neil can see the underlying streaks of auburn that Aaron waxes poetic about reflecting from the sun. Aaron freezes when he sees her, and Neil rolls his eyes when he hears his breath catch, shoving him forward with an elbow in the small of his back. It’s embarrassing how gone he is for her.

Aaron stumbles forward floating towards the front steps of the library nervously, and when Katelyn stands up to greet them, Neil can see she’s about half a foot taller that Aaron.

He doesn’t seem to mind, and he sighs serenely when Katelyn greets him with a half-hug, turning to Neil a moment later and smiling at him. Neil gives her a small smile back, and he allows himself to be grateful for a moment that she didn’t try to hug him as well. He’s come a long way since the days where he would flinch away from any new person, but he still isn’t the most comfortable with casual touch unless he trusts a person.

Katelyn leads them into the library, and Aaron drops back to tell Neil to “Sit in the corner and send me encouragement _silently._ ”

Neil sighs. “So you invited me for support only to ditch me in the corner? I didn’t even bring my math homework.”

Aaron winces. “Yes?”

“Fine,” Neil says, taking a step off in the direction of the computers when Katelyn turns around to look back at them. “You owe me one, though.”

Aaron smiles, and then frowns shortly after. “Scary,” he says, and then, “thank you.”

Neil nods once, watching Aaron make his way toward Katelyn behind a bookcase, shaking his head as he makes his way to the computers.

He sits in one of the uncomfortable grey chairs and logs into his school account, doing some quick google searches for his Econ project and taking notes in a computer document.

Neil glances over his shoulder, where the library is mostly empty aside from a few other students seated at some of the tables, and Katelyn and Aaron are still nowhere to be seen. Neil is really starting to wonder if Aaron just dragged him here to fuck with him.

Neil leans back in his chair, closing his eyes for a moment and thinking about nothing in particular. Immediately, his mind wonders away from the present, checking off boxes he needs to get to sometime this week. He needs to finish this project and finish his math homework. He needs to be prepared to either console (unlikely) or celebrate (hopefully) Aaron after this depending on Katelyn’s answer. He needs to wash his work clothes for tomorrow, which unfortunately means braving the laundromat since his and Aaron’s apartment doesn’t have a washer or dryer.

Neil sighs, already imagining the suffocating environment of the laundromat, and wonders if he should use his favor from Aaron in order to make him do the laundry instead. It seems like a waste, but Neil is definitely considering it.

He sighs, typing a few words into Google and clicking on the first result, before deeming it useless and leaning his head back on the chair.

Distantly, Neil remembers Andrew revealing that his apartment complex has a washer and dryer after the last time Neil had complained to the man about this very issue—a not-so-clear invitation that is all too tempting right now.

Andrew wouldn’t want to go out of his way to help Neil with something so boring, though, and the odds are that the man is working today anyways, so Neil puts that thought out of his mind.

Neil’s neck begins to prickle with the familiar sensation of being watched, and he whips his head back up, looking around not-so-casually in search of the perpetrator. Eventually, Neil’s eyes find them, and he roves his eyes over them discreetly as to not raise suspicion, before quickly doing a double-take at the sight of Andrew Minyard staring at him from over the top of a stubby novel.

Neil’s chest does a complicated two-step, and he clears his throat involuntarily, watching as Andrew gets to his feet and begins to walk towards him, one finger caught between the pages of his book in order to keep his place. He’s wearing a combination of black sweatpants and a tight black long sleeved shirt, and he’s wearing grey tennis shoes instead of heavy boots for once. His blonde hair is disheveled and gentle, slightly frizzy waves falling over his forehead, and he looks almost at home among the rows and rows of yellow pages and cracked book spines.

If Neil had thought he’d looked like he’d just woken up that first day at the resteraunt, Andrew might as well still be asleep in bed right now.

“Morning, Josten,” Andrew greets him quietly, and Neil feels a little lightheaded as patches of cat hair come into view on the man’s black clothes the closer he gets.

Still though, he can’t let his surprise get the better of him. “It’s passed noon, actually,” Neil retorts, and he gives himself a mental pat on the back at how unbothered the words sound.

Andrew nods, as if agreeing, but he also narrows his eyes in a glare. “I was up until 5am last night helping clean up the bar after some drunk asshole tried to strangle Roland for putting a lime in his drink and broke ten glasses. I don’t care what time it is; I didn’t get enough sleep.”

Neil hums, but is heart does pick up a little at the thought of Roland being seriously injured when he had been fast asleep and unable to help. Ever since his first day when he had dealt with the touchy drunk man—very badly, but he had dealt with him—he had rarely been scheduled so late in the evening, which Neil knows Andrew must have had everything to do with. When he does work late, it’s unavoidable, and even though he promises Andrew he has everything under control, the man checks up on him from the kitchen every few minutes, peeking his head out from behind the doors and locking eyes with Neil before popping back in like nothing had happened.

Neil acts exasperated about it, but he finds that far-away protection almost endearing, even if he does know he can handle himself. He _had_ handled himself that time.

Andrew plops himself heavily onto the chair next to Neil’s own, watching him curiously. “I never see you here,” he remarks, and Neil smiles internally at the thought of Andrew frequenting the campus library.

“No,” Neil agrees. “Aaron dragged me here and then promptly ditched me for his new girlfriend.” Neil pauses, “ _Hopefully_ new girlfriend,” he amends.

Andrew scoffs. “He’s finally asking out that girl?”

“Yep,” Neil says, “I really hope she says yes; if not for Aaron then for me. I don’t think I can take any more pining.”

Andrew nods in agreement, but his eyes linger on Neil’s face for a few seconds too long, causing his stomach to squirm.

He leans a little bit forward, and Neil’s heart begins to beat a little bit faster. “ _10 Ways to Wash Your Clothes From Home,”_ Andrew reads off, and Neil tilts his head, confused as he waits for his brain to catch up.

“Oh,” Neil says when he realizes Andrew was reading off the title of the article he’d clicked on. “I don’t want to go to the laundromat.”

Andrew rolls his eyes, standing from his chair fluidly. “I told you I have a washer and dryer for a reason, Josten,” he says. “C’mon.”

Neil logs off his computer quickly, standing to join Andrew before frowning. “I told Aaron I would morally support him,” he tells Andrew apologetically, as if he’s doing Andrew any sort of inconvenience by not letting him help Neil wash his clothes.

Andrew just holds his hand out, and Neil stares at it for a moment before the man wiggles it impatiently and prompts “Phone.”

Neil hands Andrew his phone, and the man just takes one look at the home screen and turns it right back around to face Neil.

On it is a single text from Aaron, dated to over 20 minutes ago.

**Aaron: katelyn and i are going on a date RIGHT NOW!!!! thanks 4 the support and see u at the apartment later loser**

Neil scoffs, shaking his head both at his roommate and at himself for not seeing the message sooner, taking his phone back from Andrew with a shrug. “Okay,” he says, “take me to the mythical place where you can wash clothes without also feeling like you’re committing a crime somehow.”

“My pleasure,” Andrew agrees, and he leads Neil out to his car, pulling out of the parking lot swiftly and handing Neil a small cord.

Neil looks at him quizzically. “My phone isn’t dead,” he says.

Andrew cuts him a look. “It’s an _AUX_ cord, idiot. You can plug your phone in and play music.”

Neil hums in interest, plugging his phone in immediately. “It’s a five minute drive,” he reminds Andrew.

Andrew shrugs. “Lunchtime traffic,” he says as the newest playlist Roland had made for him filters in through the car speakers. Neil has never really been the type to listen to music unless it was on in the background, but apparently Roland is some kind of music connoisseur. For several weeks he had asked Neil questions about his taste that were incredibly difficult to answer until the man had actually started to let Neil listen to some example songs. Eventually, he had sent Neil a playlist over text message, and Neil has actually been finding himself enjoying it.

“You just want to listen to my music,” Neil teases.

“Roland says you have confusing taste.”

Neil nods in concession, leaning his head back and letting the calm rush of the music wash over him.

The car ride _is_ a little longer than usual due to traffic, but it’s still not enough time for more than two songs to play through completely. Andrew parallel parks—flawlessly, as always—in front of Neil and Aaron’s apartment, and the two of them head up together in silence. Neil gathers the clothes basket from his room—which is really just grabbing the mesh bag he uses as a clothes bag and shoving all the clothes strewn about into it—as Andrew ventures into his brothers room to grab Aaron’s bag.

They meet back out in the living room, and Neil makes a detour into the bathroom to grab a few towels before they leave, the drive to Andrew’s apartment lasting all of ten minutes. It’s a part of town Neil rarely visits, and it’s less central than Neil’s apartment and Palmetto’s. Andrew punches in a code to the front door and pushes it open easily, leading him straight into a small room on the first floor where a few washers and dryers sit proudly.

Neil pours the entirety of his laundry bag into a machine and then empties Aaron’s bag right on top, and Andrew gives him a horrified look. “What the hell,” he deadpans, but he sounds almost as shaken as the time Neil had told him he sometimes microwaves his pasta in a bowl of water instead of waiting for the pot to boil.

“What?” Neil asks, genuinely confused as he reaches into his pocket for a packet of detergent he had shoved in there earlier.

He rips the top of the packet open, but Andrew catches his arm before he can dump the contents into the washer. “You didn’t separate the colors,” Andrew says, “or even glance at any of the tags. And the level of these clothes is almost reaching the top. You’re gonna kill the machine if you run this.”

Neil shrugs. “I thought the color thing was a myth. Aaron and I have been doing it this way for a year and we’ve only gotten pink socks like… twice.”

“It _is_ pretty much a myth, but the other reasons I listed are still valid, and the fact that it has happened _at all_ is more than enough reason to separate your colors,” Andrew says, and he reaches into the washing machine to scoop out the clothes, his feet dangling in the air for a few seconds as he leans over the edge of the machine.

Neil shrugs again, but he doesn’t want to argue with Andrew about this so he helps him sort the clothes out color by color, separating them into two washing machines as well despite Neil’s insistence that _this is fine._

Neil tries not to think too hard about the fact that Andrew is touching his underwear, which is kind of gross but also makes his stomach flutter a little. The fact that both he and Neil are touching Aaron’s just as often is more than enough to dissipate that feeling, though.

Andrew finally allows him to pour in the detergent, but he does tell Neil to buy the big bottle of it next time even if it seems like a lot to carry around. Neil feels almost like he’s being scolded.

Soon after they begin to run the machines, Andrew leads Neil up to his apartment, and Neil feels the luxury of being able to leave his clothes unattended all the way up the two flights of stairs.

The inside of Andrew’s apartment is both nothing and everything like he’d expected it to be. It’s cozy and cramped, but there are little splashes of color all around the place that give it personality. Neil spots a large bookcase in the corner, and an enormous amount of kitchen appliances shoved underneath a small bit of floating counter where a pastel purple microwave sits proudly. There are throw blankets and pillows covering every inch of the couch, and there is a black beanbag shoved against the wall. The windows are large, and the blinds are open, allowing light to flow through the cracks in them. There are little paper butterflies hanging from the ceiling.

The shower is also running. Neil tenses immediately upon registering the sound, but Andrew just lets out a loud “Renee! Don’t come out of there naked, Neil is here,” and suddenly everything makes sense.

“Hi Neil!” Renee’s muffled voice calls back out from the bathroom. Neil sits down on the couch among the pillows, just to do something.

Of course Andrew and Renee live together. It makes sense, considering they work together, and Neil has no idea how long the two of them have actually been together. It could have been years, for all Neil knows.

Andrew settles onto the couch next to him, immediately pulling a fluffy grey blanket over both of their laps, which Neil is grateful for. The windows make for lots of natural light, but they also allow for a lot of heat to escape in the winter, Neil is sure.

From nowhere in particular, two cats run out and wind themselves between Andrew’s blanket-covered legs, leaving fresh streaks of hair over the calves of Andrew’s sweatpants. There’s a large grey cat with white patches of fur that Andrew introduces as Sir, and a smaller black cat apparently called King.

Andrew reaches down and scratches Sir a few times under the chin, and the cat wonders off shortly after to a cat tree Neil hadn’t noticed before. King hops into Andrew’s lap and curls into a ball, big, dark eyes staring up at Neil suspiciously.

They sit in silence for a moment, until Andrew reaches under the couch to grab a basket with a plethora of WII remotes piled up inside of it. “Wanna play _Mario Kart_?”

Neil grins. Jean, Neil, and Kevin had used to play _Mario Kart_ at Kevin’s house on the weekends during high school, and it had been ridiculously competitive every time. Neil still remembered the time Kevin had actually popped a blood vessel from rage after Jean had blue-shelled him in the last five seconds of the game in Sophomore year. It had been fun, when it had been just the three of them, and Neil’s chest aches for just a moment when he remembers he and Jean had missed their last two monthly phone calls.

Still though, Neil nods, and Andrew gets to work setting up the game, pulling a _Just Dance_ CD out of the WII—which he glares at Neil for laughing at—before popping the _Mario Kart_ CD in. The screen that comes up is pure nostalgia, and Neil immediately gets to work setting up his character, selecting Yoshi as his player as he’d always used to. Andrew picks Rosalina, and he doesn’t take any further questions on the matter.

Andrew destroys Neil for the first two games, but Neil is always close behind, and he wins the third by a narrow margin, Andrew’s red shell hitting him only one second before he crosses the finish line for the final time.

Renee wanders out of the bathroom sometime during their last game wrapped in a fluffy pink towel, and she settles herself on the arm of the couch where Andrew sits to watch the end of their game. Neil wins by the skin of his teeth, and he beats Andrew in the final rankings only by a few points, which causes Andrew to dramatically exit the game as Neil and Renee giggle.

Renee requests to be in on the next game and goes off to her room to put some clothes on while Andrew smokes a pissed-off cigarette out of the window and Neil sets Andrew’s controller up again.

They start a new game shortly after, and Renee thoroughly wipes the floor with them both, which Andrew seems to have been reluctantly resigned to. Andrew moves his entire body when he steers, flopping all over the couch, while Neil grits his teeth and nearly jams his thumb from pressing down on the _go_ button so hard.

Throughout the whole thing, Renee just sits on the arm of the couch calmly, though she does deliver Andrew a swift but firm punch to the arm when he kicks her feet with his own, causing her to fall off the edge of the map and actually have to _work_ for her lead. As is true for most things in Neil’s life these days, it is surprisingly fun.

Andrew and Neil have to take a break at some point to transfer the clothes from the washer to the dryer, which Andrew _still_ insists on splitting into two machines, much to Neil’s dismay.

When they get back up to the apartment, Renee is shredding lettuce into a bowl of other vegetables, appearing to be making a salad, which Neil really hopes he isn’t going to be expected to partake in. Andrew seems to read the look on his face, but he just says “I have homemade salad dressing stocked up,” as if that is something that would change Neil’s mind on the idea of shoving raw vegetables into his mouth.

As it turns out, it does. Neil allows Andrew to feed him a slice of cucumber dipped in the dressing, and Neil’s mouth explodes in flavor. He still wrinkles his nose at Andrew to keep his reputation, but the man sees right through him, and Neil allows Renee to pile salad into a bowl for him and hand it off to Andrew, who pours a generous amount of the dressing over the top of it.

It’s not bad, ultimately, and Neil wonders how he’s going to tell Aaron about his sudden change of heart. The two of them had been vegetable-hating buddies for as long as they’d been friends, and Neil feels like he’s broken some kind of law as he tops off his enormous bowl of the things, feeling guilty in a way that he never does after eating ramen noodles for a week straight.

Maybe he’ll just smuggle some of Andrew’s dressing home and convince Aaron to try it, though he doubts Aaron would appreciate that either. He’s long since stopped trying to police Neil’s interactions with his brother, and the three of them have hung out many times since then, but it doesn’t mean Aaron suddenly likes Neil talking to him about Andrew.

He’s probably still out with Katelyn anyways, which Neil is very happy about. He hasn’t gotten a single text from Aaron in hours, which could either mean their date is going great or that Katelyn has finally gotten tired of his biology puns and killed him.

At the reminder of Aaron and Katelyn’s date, Neil remembers their discussion from earlier, when Aaron had described the reasons he liked Katelyn. At the time, Neil had dismissed it as idealistic and, frankly, vomit-inducing. Now though, as Neil settles himself back on Andrew—and apparently Renee’s—couch, he wonders if maybe there was some things he can relate to in that speech.

Neil thinks about dating in general as something unnecessary. Something futile and surface-level, and something he’s never been interested in. Recently, though, Neil has begun to feel that tingle of curiosity beneath his skin when the topic is brought up. Considering what he’d felt when he’d thought about it before—nauseous or nothing at all—Neil thinks it’s something worth taking note of.

He pulls that feeling apart in his head in the way he’s been practicing, treating it like a foreign concept. _Does he want to date anyone?_ is the current question, and where before his immediate answer would have been a hard _no,_ he’s not too sure anymore. That curiosity remains, and he pokes and prods at it until it offers him an answer—a tentative _maybe._

It’s progress from the uncertainty he’d felt only moments before, but it raises a new question. _Who_ does he want to date?

Neil doesn’t know right away, so he starts going through a mental list. Aaron is his best friend, and the thought of dating _him_ is definitely not something he ever wants to think about again, so he moves on to the next candidate.

Matt and Dan have become some of Neil’s closest friends over the last few months, but when he thinks about Matt all Neil feels is comfort and fondness—nothing more. It’s the same for Dan. Allison is contradictory in a way Neil finds interesting, but he doesn’t feel much of anything other than what he’d felt for Dan and Matt when he thinks of her. Nicky and Erik have established themselves as friends, but nothing more, and the same goes for Roland and Seth. Neil almost gags when he imagines dating Kevin or Jean.

Which leaves the people he’s in the room with right now. Renee is untouchable and wonderful, but similar to the others, Neil feels nothing special when he thinks of her in that way.

Andrew, on the other hand, Neil has to think about for a little longer, which is worrying in and of itself. Andrew had interested Neil before he’d even met him, and when he had that interest had only grown. Andrew is contradictory and confusing and Neil wants to peel back all his layers. He’s a mess in the library at 12:30pm, and he’s gentle when he pets the cats or when he steadies a plate on Neil’s tray at the restaurant. He gives Kevin shit in the kitchen and still congratulates him when he makes a dish perfectly. He helps Wymack run the restaurant and he tells off drunkards who try to hit on the girls or Roland. He’s easy to talk to and easy to be around, and he’s _kind_ at the core of everything, even when he seems like he isn’t.

He let Neil use his washer and dryer and he gives him drives home from work so he doesn’t have to walk in the dark. He had comforted Matt in the arcade after he’d won the stupid fox plushie even if it had been a dumb game from the beginning, and he had let Neil sleep in the car after, even giving Neil a prize that he had spent time and money on winning.

He was soft and ruffled across the couch with two cats in his lap and his socked feet propped up on the coffee table, answering _Jeopardy_ questions faster and more consistently than the contestants.

He’s dating Renee.

He’s dating Renee, and he lives with her and co-parents two cats with her. He leans against her easily and lets her take his weight. He goes to the arcade with her and tells her to be careful about overdoing it on the massage chairs. He’s sitting next to Renee now, and their shoulders press together easily.

Neil asks himself the question again: _Who does he want to date?_ and the answer is completely and irrevocably _Andrew_.

Neil leans his head against the back of the couch.

_Shit._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you guys enjoyed this chapter! Next week we got a long one (8K!) so buckle yourselves up for that :)
> 
> comments keep me sane if you’d like to share your thoughts! <3


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!! Very big huge and exciting chapter for us and the boys. Enjoy the slightest bit of pining and Neil generally being a demi disaster who Needs To Kiss Andrew Right This Instant. 
> 
> Hope you like it :,)

Over the next week or so, Neil thinks a lot. He thinks about talking to Aaron about this new discovery, but he quickly shuts that thought down, too afraid of Aaron’s reaction to the news. He thinks about calling Jean for the first time in months and complaining to him. Thinks about telling Matt, Dan, Allison, Seth—anyone about this thing that now eats at him from the inside out every time he sees Andrew.

Maybe he should just move back to England. Stuart would be happy to have him.

Aaron has been dating Katelyn, and it’s been going surprisingly well for him so far. He’s taken her to the movies, the park, mini golfing, and is generally just disgustingly in love with her.

Another place he’d taken her is Neil and Aaron’s apartment, apparently, since Neil had just walked in on them staring meaningfully into each other’s eyes on the couch. Neil stifles a gag at the sight, and Aaron snaps his eyes to him where he stands in the doorway, glaring at him furiously.

Katelyn lets out a surprised greeting that Neil returns halfheartedly as he makes his way into his bedroom, trying to think of a way to get himself out of here as soon as possible. He could call Andrew, since the man had just dropped him off after Neil’s afternoon shift at Palmetto’s, but Andrew had only been on break, and Neil isn’t too keen on seeing him again right now anyway since all he seems to think about is him as of late, embarrassingly.

Matt, Dan, Roland, Nicky, and Erik are all working as well, which leaves only a few options for Neil. Allison might be free, but he’s almost certain she would see right through him and demand answers about his current state. Seth is also a contender, though he’d said something to Neil the other day about studying for his economics final tonight and Neil doesn’t want to bother him. He doesn’t want to see Renee almost as much as he doesn’t want to see Andrew.

That leaves Kevin.

Neil sighs internally and picks up his phone.

**Neil: Help**

**Kevin: Oh no**

**Neil: I need you to come rescue me**

**Kevin: …okay**

**Neil: I’m at my apartment**

**Kevin: Be there in 5**

Despite the general air of awkwardness Kevin exudes, he’s always been reliable, which is something Neil can appreciate. If it had been up to Kevin Neil is sure he, Kevin, and Jean would still be just as close of friends as before. Before… everything.

It wasn’t up to Kevin though, much to the man’s probable disappointment. The only reason Neil feels comfortable with reaching out to him now has to do with the proximity of working together, and even then it’s hard to be around him with the constant reminder of Jean and Kevin’s friendship going ever strong.

Neil flops onto his bed and leans back on his elbows, letting out a tired breath. _Complicated._

Only a few minutes later, Kevin sends him a text to let him know he’s out front, and Neil heaves himself off of the bed, grabbing his phone and his wallet on the way out of his room. He steps out into the living room and narrowly avoids gagging when he sees Aaron with his tongue down his new girlfriend’s throat, managing to sneak out of the apartment without either of them so much as looking up.

He does shut the door behind him a little louder than necessary, but that’s just because he enjoys being an asshole.

Kevin’s car is a modest model, and small enough that he always looks like he has to squeeze himself into it. It’s the same one he’d been gifted for his 16th birthday back in high school, and while it’s definitely seen better days it is still going strong. Jean had jokingly named the car Thea after Kevin’s high school crush, and Kevin had turned eight different shades of red whenever Jean and Neil would tease him about it. It had been hilarious—at least up until Riko had found out and embarrassed Kevin in front of Thea and her friends by telling them about Kevin naming his car after her. It hadn’t been fun after that, and Kevin had needed to take his first-ever fake-sick day to recover from the embarrassment.

Neil will never regret being Kevin and Jean’s friend, but not a day goes by where he doesn’t wish he had gotten to punch Riko Moriyama in the face at least _once._

Kevin greets him with a small wave through the windshield when Neil finally walks out into the evening air, and Neil gives him a small nod in return.

Kevin unlocks the doors with a click, and Neil slides into the passenger seat easily, tucking his elbows into his sides to keep his warmth close to him. He feels Kevin cut a glance over to him as he puts the car back in drive, and he stubbornly keeps his eyes in front of him.

It’s… hard to be around him alone without Jean. It would be harder if Jean were there. It would be so easy if he had just never left; if Kevin and Jean had just _called him_.

But he had left, even if he hadn’t wanted to, and Jean and Kevin hadn’t called him much, even if they had wanted to, and Neil can’t bring himself to regret that.

If not for that, he may have never met Aaron, who Neil thinks would sooner smuggle himself in a suitcase to London than let him disappear. He may have never started work at Palmetto’s and met all of his new friends. May have never met Andrew.

He doesn’t regret his slight falling out with Kevin and Jean, but he thinks he might be interested in trying to fix things now, and Kevin is obviously the easiest person to start with.

“Jean has been trying to call you,” Kevin says, and it sounds almost strained under the quiet hum of the engine.

Neil knows. After the last few months of no calls, Neil had let Jean’s calls go to voicemail twice. He had only started calling a few days ago, and Neil’s mind is so scrambled right now that he doesn’t know if he would be able to deal with Jean on top of everything else—so he hadn’t. “I’ll call him back,” Neil says, because he will, even if he doesn’t particularly want to.

“Okay,” Kevin says, and then “I’m sorry… about not trying harder after you left. Jean is too.”

Neil clears his throat, idly caressing a finger over the passenger-side door handle. Kevin locks the doors just in case, but it’s been a long time since Neil has _seriously_ considered jumping out of a car to get out of a conversation, and he dug himself this grave in the first place anyways. “Okay,” Neil says. “Me too.”

“Cool,” Kevin says.

“Cool,” echoes Neil.

The rest of the ride is silent, and Neil stares out the window until he feels the car roll to a stop, zoned out completely. Kevin parks, and the car ticks when Neil finally looks up and tries to figure out where they are.

Surprisingly, they’re at a frozen yogurt shop. Neil wonders if Andrew has been more of an influence of Kevin that he’d originally thought. The Kevin Neil had known never would have been caught dead consuming anything that had more than ten grams of sugar.

Neil brings this up of course, since there is nothing he enjoys in life if not teasing Kevin, no matter how much time has passed. “You know frozen yogurt is a sham, right?” Neil asks him, trying to lighten the atmosphere a little bit. “There’s still sugar in there no matter what they say.”

Kevin rolls his eyes, leading him up the sidewalk and saying “I _know_ , Josten. This is Andrew’s thing. I was about to leave to meet him here when you texted.”

“Oh…” Neil says, even as he feels his soul leave his body just for a second at the sight of Andrew through the foggy glass at the front of the shop. He’s sitting alone at a table, his feet propped up on the chair across from him, his heavy boots just visible poking out the other end of the table. He has a small plastic spoon in his hand, and he’s idly sucking on it even with nothing else in front of him. When he pulls it out of his mouth the top of it is bright pink, having supposedly changed color from the heat of his mouth.

Neil wonders if he had had a day off after all today, or if he’d just gotten off work early. He’s not in his work clothes, so he couldn’t have just left for another break. It doesn’t matter, but Neil wants to know everything about Andrew as of late.

Kevin pushes the door open for them, and an obnoxious bell rings from the top of the door throughout the shop, causing a small woman to poke her head out from behind the counter where she must have been sitting on the floor. Neil recognizes her from one of his classes, but he doesn’t remember either her name or the class they share.

Andrew looks up sharply at their arrival as well, narrowing his eyes at Neil suspiciously. Neil looks away hastily, trying to think of a way to make it seem like he hasn’t been avoiding Andrew for the past few days and failing miserably.

Thankfully, Andrew doesn’t bring it up. “I was going to ask you why you’re late,” Andrew begins, eyes on Kevin now, who is already making his way toward the wall of cups. “But it seems that the answer is obvious now.”

Kevin shrugs, grabbing the smallest size of cup available and making a beeline to the small number of machines that boast fruit sorbet flavors. “He said he needed to be rescued.”

Andrew stands up from the chair, swiftly and effectively cutting in front of Neil as he makes his way to the cups, brushing his shoulder against Neil’s lightly. Neil shivers embarrassingly at the slight touch, hit once again with the weight of his recent realization.

Andrew is overwhelming in the best ways possible, and it hurts to look at him for too long recently. Being in Andrew’s presence requires Neil to be on constant vigilance, and every movement the man makes Neil is suddenly aware of.

Neil has never felt this way about anyone before, and he’s not quite sure what to do with himself. He supposes he’s just going to have to get used to it, since he doesn’t actually _want_ to avoid Andrew for the rest of time. Surely it will start to get easier eventually.

Andrew pulls the largest size of cup off of the stack and starts toward the frozen yogurt flavors. Neil hurries to follow, grabbing the smallest cup and coming to stand back beside Andrew, who is staring at two different kinds of chocolate in contemplation. To Neil, he asks “Finally decide my brother isn’t worth your time?”

If anyone else had said that about Aaron, Neil would have immediately been on the defensive, but Neil can hear the teasing edge to Andrew’s voice just as easily as he can hear it in Aaron’s. “No,” Neil says, “I just didn’t really want to listen to him and his new girlfriend try to eat each other’s tongues for any longer than necessary.”

Andrew hums and seems to make a decision, taking a step forward and filling half of his enormous cup with one kind of chocolate before moving on to the next flavor and filling up the rest with that. Kevin is already back at their table by now, and Neil contemplates the flavors for only a moment before he decides on the strawberry sorbet, filling his cup three quarters of the way.

Ready to checkout, Neil nearly bumps into Andrew at the counter, where he can now see an enormous array of toppings are spread out behind a sheet of glass. Neil frowns as Andrew instructs the worker to put dozens of things that _definitely_ shouldn’t be considered toppings on his frozen yogurt. The woman behind the counter doesn’t look fazed in the slightest, and she does as Andrew requests, dumping different kinds of candies, sprinkles, gummies, and cookies into Andrew’s cup, finishing off strong with some drips of chocolate sauce, caramel, whipped cream, and more sprinkles.

Neil gets some fresh strawberries on his own sorbet, as a treat. He follows Andrew’s lead, weighing his cup and paying the women. His is only a few ounces, and he’s almost reluctantly impressed when he sees that Andrew’s is nearly three pounds.

Neil smiles to himself at the look on Kevin’s face when Andrew settles back in at their table and takes the first enormous bite of his monstrosity.

“How do you even exist?” Kevin asks him incredulously, watching in horror as Andrew works his way through his frozen yogurt.

“Well,” Andrew begins sarcastically, sucking a sour gummy worm into his mouth, “when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much—”

Neil chokes on a laugh, and Kevin shoves Andrew’s shoulder from across the table. “Shut up,” he huffs, but he’s grinning too even as he watches Andrew bring another spoonful into his mouth.

Now that Andrew is back in his sights, Neil can’t seem to take his eyes off of him. He distractedly eats his sorbet, missing his mouth a few times as he watches Andrew. There’s a certain gleam in his eyes when the sun reflects off of them, which Neil supposes could be due to either the amount of sugar in front of him or pissing off Kevin. Either way, Neil can deduce that he’s enjoying himself.

Andrew’s lips wrap around the spoon with every bite, and Neil can’t look away. Andrew picks up a gummy shark and bites it clean in half easily, snapping his eyes up to meet Neil’s in the same instant. Neil freezes, caught, and his spoonful of sorbet slips back into his cup pathetically.

Andrew raises an eyebrow, and Neil gives him a small smile, his spoon still hovering in the air. Andrew smirks. Neil’s breath leaves him in a rush and it’s frankly ridiculous how much the tiny movement effects him. His stomach flutters happily, and warmth creeps up his spine, making its way up to Neil’s neck and cheeks.

They stay like that for a few moments, locked in each other’s stares with their frozen treats melting in their cups. Kevin clears his throat, glancing in between Neil and Andrew suspiciously. “Um,” Kevin says eloquently.

Andrew drops his gaze, and Neil tries not to let himself feel disappointed. He pokes at the last few inches of sorbet in the bottom of his cup as Andrew silently finishes his own treat, feeling put out and strange all of a sudden.

Neil picks up a strawberry between his fingertips as Kevin starts talking to Andrew about Palmetto’s, sucking the berry between his lips and idly watching the sun reflect rainbows off of a spill of oil in the parking lot.

Neil can feel Andrew’s eyes on him again, but he doesn’t meet his gaze, still too afraid of the swell of emotion still making waves up his spine. He finally takes a bite out of the strawberry and thinks about the way Andrew had held his gaze just then. How Neil could almost see the same glimmer of _something_ behind his eyes that he knows lingers behind his own.

He sighs, dropping the leaves of the strawberry back into his cup and walking to the trash can to throw the rest of it away, trying not the think about the weight of Andrew’s stare on his back as he walks.

Nothing will come of this, and Neil needs to accept that.

~

Neil works a closing shift on a Tuesday night, and the restaurant is near-empty aside from the bar patrons, meaning they’re able to lock the doors an hour or two earlier than usual and start the cleanup process then. Roland clears out the last few customers with a few pointed comments he somehow manages to make sound polite, and then he promptly connects his phone to the restaurant speakers and starts blasting _Jessie’s Girl._

Matt and Allison flit around the tables with wet washcloths, and Neil attempts to hold onto the broom when Matt dances over to him and catches him in a low dip. Neil laughs despite his insistence that Matt messed up his progress, and Matt grins right back. Allison’s skirt flows out around her as she twirls around the empty restaurant.

Neil finishes up sweeping, heading into the kitchen to put the broom and dustpan back in the closet where they keep the cleaning supplies, smiling to himself when he sees Andrew in the corner of the kitchen trying to wipe the counters while also doing a little dance.

Tuesdays are rarely busy, and usually Andrew is the only one in the kitchen on dead days—meaning that he’s also usually left to do all of the kitchen cleanup on dead days—which Neil personally thinks isn’t fair at all. He starts sweeping the floor in the kitchen, delighting in the startled expression that graces Andrew’s face when he notices Neil. Roland’s playlist continues, playing one upbeat song after another as Andrew and Neil work around each other. Neil allows himself to sway his hips a little bit, and he hides his grin in the crook of his wrist when Andrew starts to nod his head a little more.

Eventually, the kitchen is completely clean again, and Andrew heads out to the car to wait for Neil while he grabs his bag from the back and says goodbye to Allison and Matt. Roland had passed through the kitchen a few minutes ago and asked Andrew if he could have a ride, and Neil tries not to feel a little sad about the fact that he won’t have Andrew to himself on the drive home.

Matt and Allison both wish him a good night, and Allison pulls him into a one-shouldered hug and tries to convince him to talk in the group chat more often for the 100th time.

He grabs his stuff quickly after that, and when he steps out into the parking lot it is dark and cold. Andrew’s car sits empty in its designated spot, but Neil can hear quiet voices from around the corner of the building. He pauses, not wanting to disrupt but not wanting to eavesdrop either, until he hears Roland’s gentle voice cut through the wind. “Is everything okay?”

Neil hears the click of a lighter, and is hit by the scent of cigarette smoke not too long after. “Yeah,” he hears Andrew’s voice say. “Things are just confusing recently.”

Roland huffs. “I hear that,” he says. “You haven’t seemed very interested in me in the last few weeks. Months even.”

Andrew says, “I was never interested in you,” but Neil can hear the amusement in his voice.

“You know what I mean, Andrew,” Roland says, and he sounds serious. “You’re my friend. You can tell me what’s going on.”

“I would if I wanted to,” Andrew says. “Just like I would tell you if I wanted to hook up. Maybe you’re just not my type anymore.”

And suddenly Neil has overheard too much. He remembers Andrew and Roland sneaking off into the back on that first day all those months ago. Remembers that happening again several times after that. He pushes past the immediate sick feeling in his stomach at the thought of Andrew kissing people _in general_ and gets to the core of his betrayal.

_Renee._

Neil immediately clears his throat, scuffing his shoes in the rocks under his feet and making his way to the car. Andrew and Roland follow only a moment later, and while Roland just slips into the backseat with a smile at Neil, Andrew narrows his eyes at him in suspicion.

Neil doesn’t look at him. _Can’t_ look at him. Doesn’t know what to think. Doesn’t want to think about this. Needs to talk to Andrew alone.

He gets into the passenger seat silently, plugging in his phone and cranking the volume of his playlist up until it’s too loud to talk over.

Andrew clenches his jaw.

Usually Neil would be dropped off first, but this time Andrew drives straight past Neil’s apartment complex without a word. Neil doesn’t say anything either, and the drive is completely silent aside from Roland’s oblivious humming from the backseat until they roll to a stop in from of another complex.

Andrew turns the volume down until it can hardly be heard, but he still doesn’t say anything as he puts the car back into drive.

Neil follows suit, staring out of the windshield until his eyes go a little watery and the colors on the stoplights begin to smudge in his vision.

“I won’t apologize,” Andrew says eventually, tightly, and Neil frowns to himself. 

“What?” Neil asks warily. “Why would you apologize to _me_?”

Andrew’s shoulders are tense as he grips the wheel. “For you overhearing Roland and I; I won’t apologize.”

“I don’t expect for you to,” Neil says, and he means it even as he feels the world slipping further out from underneath him. “You do your own shit.”

Andrew is silent for a minute, the only sounds coming from the gentle growl of the car engine and the soft puttering of music from the car speakers. “Ask me,” Andrew says suddenly, and Neil shoots a look at him, confused.

“Wha—” Neil starts, but Andrew cuts him off. 

“Ask me what you want to know about Roland,” Andrew elaborates, and Neil swallows. 

He could ask plenty of things, but there’s nothing else he could possibly ask in good conscience aside from “Does Renee know?”

Andrew’s face doesn’t give away much, but he does cut Neil a confused glance across the gearshift. “What?”

“Does Renee know about you and Roland,” Neil elaborates, and he watches the exact moment Andrew realizes what he means cross his face. 

Despite the seriousness of their conversation, Andrew gives an unamused chuckle, sounding almost hysterical. Neil frowns, confused now. “You think I am dating Renee,” Andrew states, and it sounds like he’s trying not to laugh. 

Neil frowns deeper, feeling like he’s missing the punchline to a joke everyone else is laughing at. “Yes..” he says slowly, and then, “you’re…not?”

Andrew grins in earnest now, his shoulders rolling back as he relaxes against the seats. “Renee is my best friend,” he says, “and we live together. That is all.”

Neil’s heartbeat ratchets up a few notches, and he says “Oh,” leaning back into his own seat.

“Yeah,” Andrew says.

“And Roland?” Neil asks, more curious than anything else now, feeling himself teetering on the edge of something bigger.

Andrew sighs quietly, pulling the car into park in front of Neil’s building. Neil makes no move to get out. “Roland was an occasional convenience I used to indulge in when I was feeling particularly self-destructive,” he says.

“And… now?” Neil asks, still feeling a little lost.

Andrew closes his eyes and lulls his head back against his head rest. “He is my friend,” he admits, and it sounds like he’s telling the truth. “I haven’t sought that kind of thing out in months and Roland was checking in on me since that is quite… unusual.”

Neil’s breaths come a little easier after that, and he doesn’t want to put too much thought into why that is. He leans his head back on the head rest, and Andrew doesn’t ask him to leave. 

Neil lets the calm atmosphere roll over him in waves, until he feels his phone buzz in his pocket. He fishes it out, sighing when he sees it’s a text from Aaron.

**Aaron: kno it’s late notice but katelyn is here… you don’t have to stay away but just be aware**

Neil sighs, knocking his head back against the rest with perhaps a bit too much force.

Andrew raises an eyebrow at him from across the console. “Trouble in paradise?”

Neil scoffs, “Fuck off. Aaron has Katelyn over.”

Andrew wrinkles his nose. “Gross,” he says. “Straight sex… gross.”

Despite the situation, Neil grins. “I _did_ think you were in a committed relationship with Renee until like… five minutes ago,” he points out.

“Uh huh,” Andrew says. “And now I will work the rest of my life to make sure I never get confused for a straight man again.”

Neil huffs, raising his eyebrows when Andrew starts the car back up and backs out of the spot. “Where are you taking me?”

“I’m about to change your life,” Andrew says, and Neil frowns, confused, until Andrew sighs in exasperation. “The movies. By the time I drop you back off they will be asleep… hopefully.”

Neil checks the time. It’s nearing 11pm, and Neil has an 8am class in the morning, but he suddenly feels wide awake. He nods at Andrew, grinning, and relaxes back into his seat.

Andrew takes him to a drive-in movie theater—which Neil only knows about because Allison and Seth had taken him to it last month—and Andrew insists on stopping for food on the way.

They stop at a gas station for snacks—candy bars for Andrew, cheese puffs for Neil, and popcorn for both of them—and Andrew parks them perfectly in the middle of the screen. Andrew unearths a thick knitted quilt from somewhere in the trunk of his car, and he helps Neil pull it over both of their shoulders.

The movie is in black and white, and on screen a man takes a woman’s hand and kisses it as she curtsies. Their voices are crinkly and old, but Neil can understand that the man is asking the woman on a date. She says yes, of course, since it’s a movie, and Neil lulls his head to the side to watch Andrew instead.

The flashes from the movie reflects off his dark eyes and pale skin, and Neil doesn’t know if he’s ever going to be able to come back from this. He thinks about Aaron and Katelyn; about how Aaron had asked Katelyn on a date and she’d said _yes_. He thinks about the dumb old movie. He thinks about when he’d finally figured out the nature of his feelings for Andrew.

To Andrew he asks “Do you date?”

Andrew glances over at him, pulling the quilt up under his chin and scrunching down into it further. “I… don’t usually,” he says, and it’s even worse now that he’s facing Neil head-on. This way, Neil is forced to watch the flicker of light play across the bridge of Andrew’s nose; the delicate curve of his top lip. His hair is glowing and unnaturally bright, and he looks almost ethereal like this.

Neil wants to take a picture; wants to capture how Andrew looks just now and fold that memory into his pocket for later. He wants to touch Andrew and feel the ghost of stubble against his fingertips as he grazes his jaw. He wants to go on dates with Andrew and watch stupid drive-in movies and have it _mean_ something. He wants to know if he’s alone in these wants or not—if they’re even achievable.

“Okay,” Neil whispers, and he huddles himself closer into his own side of the quilt. “Neither do I.”

Andrew hums, and he turns back to face the movie. Neil does the same, and he nearly jumps out of his skin when he feels Andrew’s fingertips press against the back of his own hand that had been resting by the cup holders. His hand tenses and relaxes in quick succession, and he brushes Andrew’s hand right back, trying to calm the raucous beat of his heart.

“I don’t date,” Andrew says, quietly into the space between them. “But I wouldn’t mind dating you, Neil.”

Neil’s heart shudders, and he feels his cheeks turn up sharply into a smile he can’t contain. “Oh really?”

Immediately, a blush comes up to grace Andrew’s face. “Don’t make me say it again,” Andrew huffs, finally pushing their hands closer to lace their fingers together properly. “That shit’s embarrassing.”

Neil leans a little closer into Andrew’s space, squeezing his hand a little tighter and loving the way Andrew’s rough palm feels against his own. His fingers are wide and his knuckles are bunched up, but Neil wouldn’t want it any other way. “You _like_ me…” he sing-songs, and Andrew lets out a heavy sigh.

“So it seems,” he says, and Neil grins.

They stay for the rest of the movie, and by the time Andrew peels out of the drive in it’s nearing 1am. Neil knows he’s going to hate himself for this in the morning, but he can’t bring himself to care about it too much now; not when Andrew holds his hand over the gearshift the entire way back to the city and Neil feels calmer than he’s felt in probably years. Andrew is brushing his thumb over the back of Neil’s hand in smooth motions and Neil is finding it difficult to focus on anything else.

Andrew parks the car back in front of Neil’s building and Neil sighs, making as if to get out of the car. Andrew’s hand stops him though, and before he knows it he’s being pulled closer into Andrew’s space by the collar of his shirt and asked “Yes or no?”

Neil smiles a little, whispering “Yes” into the ever-lessening space between them, and Andrew leans in, kissing him soundly on the cheek.

Neil hums, and the fluttering feeling in his stomach is yet to lessen; he has never felt this intensely about anything before, and it’s both exhilarating and terrifying—how much something as simple as a kiss on the cheek can effect him.

Andrew and Neil pull back at the same time, and Neil is please to see that Andrew doesn’t look much better off than he must. His cheeks are flushed and hot and his pupils are blown wide, and he looks like he’s just been doing something far less innocent than giving cheek kisses.

Neil finally opens the passenger’s side door, hopping out. He leans down to blow Andrew a little kiss right in the face of his supposed unaffected stare.

Neil can’t stop smiling—at least until he remembers something very important that he probably should not have forgotten and it slips right off his face, replacing most of the fluttering in his stomach with dread.

Andrew looks at him in concern, but all Neil does is groan and say “Shit… _Aaron._ ”

Andrew closes his eyes in quiet disbelief. “Goddammit,” he says.

Neil feels like he needs to hit his head against the wall. _Aaron._

_~_

They don’t do anything about Aaron.

Admittedly, they probably should, but Neil doesn’t really see the point in pissing off his friend even further just yet, especially since he still has no idea what exactly is going on between him and Andrew.

Nothing has changed between them since they’d gone to the drive-in movie, but somehow things feel different. More substantial. Charged. Like one wrong move will send them tumbling down a hilltop together, tripping over each other’s laces as they go.

It feels like they’re on the precipice of something big, and Neil is all too keen on the idea of doing something about it. He’s known about his apparent interest in Andrew for a while now, and he’s starting to feel the dredges of attraction and want pulling at his stomach at the sight of the man more recently as well, and he honestly wants nothing more than for Andrew to kiss him senseless.

He would have thought that the feeling is mutual after their movie night had it not been for the fact that Andrew seems to have forgotten anything had even happened. Neil is sure he hadn’t actually done so, but he’s making a convincing argument against that assumption, which is irritating and endearing all at once.

Andrew still gives him bites of strawberries from the kitchen when Neil comes in to grab trays of food, and he still bitches to Neil about Kevin’s horrible (minor and fixable) cooking atrocities. He still invites Neil over to do laundry and play Mario Kart with Renee, and he still comes over to Neil and Aaron’s place to pick on his brother sometimes—tense but genuine as they always are around each other.

Neil almost feels like he’s in a stand-off. Against Andrew and his mixed signals—which Neil never thought would be an issue for _him_ of all people. Against Aaron and the girlfriend taking up all of his time. Against Aaron and Andrew all at once, on the rare occasions that they and Neil are in the same room together alone for an extended amount of time. It’s exhausting, and Neil just wants everything to make sense again.

He doesn’t want anything to change. He wants to keep being Andrew’s friend. He wants to kiss Andrew until he can no longer catch his breath. He wants to keep his promise to Aaron. He wants to tell Aaron to fuck off with his dumb policies and accept Neil and Andrew’s relationship for what it is—whether it be friends or otherwise.

Neil sighs, drooping his head forward until his forehead makes contact with the polished wood of the bar, making a heavy _thud_ against it and causing Neil wince a little from pain.

The restaurant is dead on a Monday evening, and they’re already on track to close an hour or two early so Neil is able to sit in silence for a good few minutes. Eventually another, much louder, thud sounds from beside his head and he looks up sharply, his eyes catching on the full glass of water sitting next to him and then on Seth, who is staring down at Neil with a raised eyebrow. “You okay, buddy?” he asks, leaning his elbows back on the opposite side of the bar and watching Neil curiously.

“Ugh,” Neil says expressively, sitting up straight now and sipping at his water. Had it been a few months ago Neil would have never drank something unopened even at Palmetto’s, but Seth, Renee, and Roland have had more than enough chances to off him by now so he lets it slide. _Besides_ , he thinks almost involuntarily, if something happens that Neil can’t handle himself, there is no doubt in his mind that Andrew would get him out of that situation.

The reminder of Andrew sets a warm fire in Neil’s stomach, and he’s back to square one again. He groans pitifully, letting his forehead fall back to the bar with another _thump._ Seth pats his head sympathetically. “You wanna talk about it, kid?”

Neil looks up just for long enough to glare at Seth for the nickname. “I don’t even know how I would talk about it. I don’t really know what’s going on myself.”

“Damn,” Seth huffs out, and Neil listens to him rustle around behind the bar. “I know that feeling.”

Neil looks up. “You do?”

“Yeah, dude,” Seth says. “Don’t worry about me, though. Everything is sorted out now.” He says this with a fond smile, and Neil wonders now for the first time if he will ever truly understand the relationships of his coworkers. He doesn’t really even know if he wants to anymore.

“I just—” Neil starts, uncertain. He looks around the vacant restaurant, considering his options. It would probably be beneficial to talk about this with someone. Usually he’d go to Aaron, but that’s not really an option in this situation. The same goes for Jean, though the man has been trying to catch Neil on a call for the past few weeks or so—Neil needs to call him back. No one else is really looking like a _preferred_ choice, but Seth is trustworthy enough, Neil supposes. “I’ve never really had a problem like this before.”

“Like what?” Seth leans forward onto the bar a few feet away, resting his chin in his palm.

“Like…” Neil trails off. “A… crush.”

Seth raises an eyebrow, grinning. “You’ve never had a crush? No, wait— _you_ have a crush? Who is it?”

Neil clenches his jaw in a stony silence, but his eyes glance at the closed swing doors of the kitchen tellingly. Seth laughs delightedly. “No _way_!”

“Shh,” Neil hushes quickly, but to no avail. “I didn’t think you were such a gossiper.”

“I’m not,” Seth insists, “but you’ve been working here for months and I haven’t seen you look at a single person for more than five seconds. It’s just interesting, is all.”

“Yeah,” Neil mumbles. “I’m glad you’re happy about it.”

Seth huffs a little. “C’mon, dude, this is exciting!”

“It’s not,” Neil complains. “It’s confusing and I hate it.”

“Well,” Seth starts, looking thoughtful as he begins twirling a wine glass precariously between two fingers like a baton. “Have you talked to him about it?”

Neil shakes his head and then squints. “How do you even know who I’m talking about?”

Seth smiles a little wider, and Neil squints harder. “I don’t, I suppose,” he says. “It’s Andrew, though, right?”

Neil shushes him again, glancing at the kitchens again nervously. Seth cackles, and Neil glares at him. “How did you know?”

“When I said I’d never seen you look at anyone like that,” Seth begins, “Andrew’s the only exception. You talk about him a lot. And stare.”

Neil feels his cheeks heat up a little bit. _Does he?_ He hadn’t noticed, but Neil supposes it had also taken him several months to notice his interest in Andrew at all. He feels frustrated and confused. Like everyone in his life knows him better than he knows himself. He groans.

Seth pats his head again. “It’s okay man,” he says. “But what happened to get you so worked up over this? Is it just you realized you have a crush?”

Neil hums uncertainly. “No,” he admits. “I realized that a few weeks ago. Andrew and I talked about some stuff recently and we went to a drive-in movie. He—” Neil cuts himself off as the kitchen doors swing open and Andrew steps out briefly. He glances around the empty restaurant and tells Seth and Neil to lock the front doors early.

Once he’s back safely behind the doors and Neil has locked up the restaurant and returned to the bar sweep around it Seth asks “He what?”

“Um,” Neil says, stalling. He still feels a little over-warm when he thinks about it. “He dropped me off at my apartment and he um… kissed my cheek.”

“Oh my _god._ ” Seth whispers delightedly, and then “That doesn’t sound very confusing to me.”

Neil winces. “It’s not that part that was confusing. He’s been acting like it never happened for more than a week. And Aaron would… not be happy about it if anything were to come of this.”

Seth’s forehead wrinkles a little. “He’s still on that?”

“On what?” Neil questions.

“He used to be… homophobic… in High School and stuff.” Seth’s frown deepens. “I did too. I thought he got past that a long time ago.”

Neil scrunches his nose up in confusion. “What? No,” Neil says, filing away that information for a later date. “He doesn’t like Andrew and I being friends.”

“Oh,” says Seth. “Well fuck that.”

Despite the headache this conversation is giving him, Neil laughs. “Yeah,” he says, “I know he would get over it soon enough. He’s just stubborn and I’d hate to break his trust with something as dumb as this.”

Seth pauses where he’s wiping down the barstools. “Is it?” he asks, “Dumb?”

Neil thinks about it, for longer than is necessary. He knows the answer already. “No,” he admits, his shoulders slumping a little. “I wish it were.”

Seth finishes his cleaning, stacking the last barstool and leaning back against the bar. “Look man,” he starts, crossing his arms over his chest. “You just need to talk to Minyard about it. Probably both of them, actually. It sounds like Andrew is trying to get you to bring it up again—even _I_ can tell you that.”

Neil hope up from the barstool and dumps the last dustpan-full of dirt and dust into the trash can, coming up to lean against the bar with Seth once again once he’s done so. “Yeah,” he sighs. “Yeah, you’re right.”

Seth grins “You can say that again, kid.”

Neil shoves his shoulder against Seth’s, glaring at the man a little sideways. “Don’t get too proud of yourself. You might be right but you still also just gave me the most basic advice of all time.”

“It’s gonna work, though,” Seth insists. “Your relationship with thrive off of my guidance.”

“Sure,” Neil allows, “thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

The two of them lapse into silence for a moment, until the kitchen doors swing open with a creak and Andrew pokes his head out, his light hair messy and recently-free from the restrains of his hairnet. “You coming, Josten?”

Neil watches the twitch of Andrew’s dark brows and the other minute shifts of his expression, silent. Seth shoves him pointedly, and Neil glares, clearing his throat. “Yeah,” he tells Andrew, pushing away from the bar. “Be right out.”

He follows Andrew out to the car, the frozen night air sweeping his hair out of his face and curling around the delicate skin of his wrists and neck. Andrew is a gentle outline against the yellow light from the street lamps, and he looks confident and attractive when he leans against the hood of his car and watches Neil step closer to him.

Neil lets out a heavy breath through his nose, fighting the urge to touch Andrew as he comes to stand a few feet in front of the man. A cloud of breath appears in front of his face, making Neil blink. His nose is frozen, and Andrew’s cheeks are flushed with the cold.

Andrew doesn’t say anything, letting the silence stretch between them for a few moments until he starts to shiver in his leather jacket. Neil backs away a few steps and starts towards the passenger seat. “It’s cold,” he says.

Andrew hums in agreement, unlocking the car doors with a click and popping the key into the ignition. Neil’s seat warmer is already flicked on, and it only takes a minute or two before the expensive car begins blowing warm air onto their faces. Neil sighs out in contentment, leaning back into his seat as Andrew puts the car in drive, the quiet rumble of the engine the only noise disrupting the silence.

It only takes a few minutes until Andrew is pulling the car up in front of Neil’s building and swinging into a parking spot. Neil looks up at the windows of his apartment, dark and dormant. Aaron must be out with Katelyn again. He huffs a sigh, not making any move to get out of his seat. Andrew waits him out, letting Neil sort through his thought on his own. “I don’t want to go in yet,” Neil admits finally, glancing over at Andrew, profile.

Andrew looks at Neil with a sidelong glance, says “Okay,” and puts the car back into drive, pulling through the parking lot and back out into the main road. “Any particular reason?”

Neil shrugs, biting his lip in thought. “I don’t think Aaron’s back yet,” he says, then “And I… didn’t want to leave you just yet either.”

Andrew’s grip on the wheel tightens, and Neil lets a small smile grace his face. Perhaps that was a bit forward, but it’s not like Andrew hadn’t already kissed his cheek last week. “Oh,” Andrew says, and his voice is the slightest bit higher than usual.

Neil smiles at him. “Yeah. Where are we going?”

Andrew hums, putting his full attention on the road once again. “They’re playing a zombie movie at the drive-in tonight,” he says, and it sounds like a tentative offer.

Neil takes it, melting back into his seat. “Okay,” he says quietly, happily.

The rest of the drive is quiet, and when they finally get to the drive-in they’re the only car in sight. Flashes of light play across the empty lawn and reflect over the smooth planes of Andrew’s cheeks. Neil can’t look away from him, thinking about leaning over and kissing Andrew right then and there. He wonders if Andrew would say yes if he asked. Wonders if Andrew would kiss him back as hard as Neil wishes he would. Wonders if he’d pull him in by the collar of his shirt and bring him into his space or if he would lean overtop of Neil and kiss him into the passenger seat. Neil’s stomach flutters aggressively, and he has to look back at the movie to compose himself, letting out a shaky breath as he does so.

Andrew looks over at him just as Neil looks away, and Neil feels his gaze burning into the side of his face like a physical thing, begging him to face Andrew again.

Neil gives in without much protest, watching the lines of Andrew’s face and throat as the colors shift; the straight slopes of his nose and jaw, the curves of his eyes and mouth, his dark eyebrows quirked in confusion. Neil aches to touch him, and he lets himself fall, feeling the ground coming up to meet him much quicker than he was prepared for. “Andrew,” he sighs, and he watches as the man’s face changes. His eyebrows lower and the crease of his brow smooths out, his eyes softening around the edges.

“Neil,” Andrew returns quietly, the leather seats creaking as they both shift a little closer at the same time.

Neil doesn’t know when everything stated to feel like it had been leading up to this moment, but he definitely feels it now—that tingling of excitement and uncertainty warring with the weight of his desire for the man in front of him and the knowledge that Andrew most likely wants the same thing as him. It doesn’t make it any less nerve-wracking.

He just has to bite the bullet.

“Yes or no?” Neil asks, enjoying the way Andrew’s breath seems to catch in his throat.

Andrew leans forward even more, crowding closer into Neil’s space, and Neil’s lets out a shuddering breath when their eyes meet, the dumb zombie movie abandoned. “Yes,” Andrew says, “Kiss me.”

Neil doesn’t have to be told twice. Andrew surges forward at the same time Neil leans back to accommodate him, and their mouths meet in a wave of motion, a hard press of lips that quickly softens and opens when Andrew’s tongue brushes Neil’s lip and deepens it.

During his Sophomore and Junior years of high school—Jean had called those his sexuality crisis years—Neil had kissed quite a few people. He’d kissed a few girls and one or two boys. He’d kissed Jean once. He’d never felt a thing. Those kisses had been nothing but an experiment or a fleeting moment of curiosity. He’d never tried to further those relationships and he’d never wanted a kiss to last any longer than it had to.

This kiss is not like those.

Andrew’s mouth is heavy on Neil’s own and it coaxes every last breath out of Neil’s lungs. He’s being torn apart from the inside-out, fire raging under his chest. Andrew is pushing closer towards him, pushing Neil’s spine against the back of the passenger seat and placing a hand on the built-in armrest of Neil’s door and leaning over him. He’s half out of his seat, and Neil is silently smug that this is the way things had gone; Andrew is unbelievably attractive above him when they finally pull back for air and Neil can see the man’s face again.

Neil grins up at him and tells Andrew just that. “You’re hot,” he says, a little bit giddy, and he watches Andrew attempt to glare while also looking completely wrecked. He’s breathing heavily overtop of Neil, his eyes wide and his pupils enlarged. His cheeks and lips are pink and his hair falls forward into his face loosely.

“Shut up,” Andrew grumbles, surging back in to kiss him again.

Neil takes a moment to think about how he’s pretty sure making out at drive-in theaters is some sort of high school stereotype before he’s distracted once again by the scrape of Andrew’s teeth against his bottom lip and the tingling sensation they leave behind. He can’t get over the way Andrew looks above him, his arms keeping him propped over Neil and only the force of his kisses keeping Neil back against his seat.

It’s a lot. It’s probably the most Neil’s ever felt all at once before in his life, and he never wants it to end. Andrew pulls back eventually to direct Neil into the backseat, scoffing at Neil’s raised eyebrow. They kiss in the backseat of Andrew’s cars like teenagers hiding from their parents, but it’s the best thing ever. Neil gets his hands on Andrew’s face as soon as he can, feeling the lines and slopes of it beneath his fingers, and Andrew feels his own way along Neil’s shoulders and waist.

Andrew drags Neil into his lap at some point, and their kisses start to peter out from there, leading into trailing kisses down necks and shoulders. Neil relaxes his full weight onto Andrew, resting his face in the man’s neck and giving small kisses there. The faint sounds of the zombie movie still filter through the speakers, but Andrew’s voice cuts through it easily when he says “This is going to be a mess.”

Neil hums, letting the gentle slide of Andrew’s palms around his waist lull him into relaxing completely. “It is,” Neil admits, before pulling his face away from Andrew’s neck and pressing a quick kiss to his lips. “Worth it.”

Andrew’s mouth quirks up a little bit. “It is,” he admits quietly, and Neil grins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is truly another one of my favorite chapters ahhhh I absolutely loved writing this :) hope you guys enjoy it just as much!
> 
> I really wanted to make Neil a little more confident in this one and i think I’m in too deep now lol I’m hooked on Neil who knows what he wants (its andrew) and I really liked having Neil ask for their first kiss in this au!! Andrew was 😳
> 
> Thank you for reading! Comments mean the world to me! :)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Bit of a light chapter before things start to pick up again! Some sneaking and some sappy texting coming up

Neil doesn’t think he has enough time to balance the state of his life right now. Since starting work at Palmetto’s his previously extensive amounts of free time have been eaten up almost completely, and between work, school, and sleep, Neil is being juggled around by his coworkers more often than not. Dan and Matt have taken them back to the mall twice more since the first time, and Nicky and Erik make it a point to take him and Aaron out for brunch once a week. They invite Andrew, too, and if he can get out of work he joins them.

It’s… something. Andrew piles his pancakes so high with whipped cream and syrup that Neil nearly has a breakdown, to which Andrew piles higher. Aaron always get the same omelette and hash browns Andrew turns his nose up at just to piss his brother off, and Neil gets eggs and toast. Nicky is overbearing and loud on his own, but Erik seems to balance his energy out in a way they don’t even seem to notice, and the two of them keep sending each other fleeting glances all throughout the meals.

And then there’s Andrew himself.

It’s been a few days since their kiss at the drive-in theater and Neil is still feeling the effects of it acutely. If things were uncertain before, they are even more so now—in different ways. Now that the air is clear between him and Andrew, Neil wants nothing more than to kiss and touch him at every chance he gets. Stolen kisses in the front seats of the Maserati and the outdoor bench of Palmetto’s can only go so far, and Neil feels the strain between himself, Aaron, and Andrew grow tighter with each passing day.

Complicated. Everything is _complicated._ Neil has enough trouble trying to work out his own shit. Trying to figure out the inner-workings of so many people at once is beyond exhausting.

On Saturday, Allison, Renee, and Seth take him mini-golfing.

Or at least, that’s where they told him they were taking him. Now would also be the perfect time to strand him in a cornfield or something, but Neil doesn’t think Renee would allow for that to happen. Neil wouldn’t put it past the other two.

Seth has been sending him far too many knowing looks over the last few days, and Neil shuts them down with a glare every time. Renee has also given him a few smug smiles, and Neil had returned them a little testily, still a bit pissed off at himself for believing she and Andrew were a thing for so long.

Neil glances down at the phone in his lap in a way he hopes is inconspicuous. He had been seated in the backseat with Seth behind Renee and Allison, and he doesn’t trust the person he’s texting—Andrew—enough to confidently check the message with his there. His thigh jitters, his fingers twitching in his lap, but the two of them sit in mostly-comfortable silence while the girls chat until they reach their supposed destination. It’s a run-down, splintery, wooden building with little patches of smooth green turf and a few pirate statues in front of it. Neil eyes it warily. “Capt’n Frank’s Mini-golf?” Neil asks skeptically, reading the sign.

“Yep,” says Allison proudly from the driver’s seat. “Best course around here.”

Neil almost makes another scathing remark at that, but he stops himself, following Allison’s lead towards the front of the building. He leans up against a wooden pillar and checks his phone while Allison rents them all little clubs and teases Neil about getting him a kid’s size.

**Andrew: $20 and i will spit in the pasta aaron just ordered from me**

**Andrew: too slow. what a shame**

**Andrew: he’s here with his girlfriend**

**Andrew: they’re making gross faces at each other and feeding each other**

**Andrew: i’m so glad you don’t feed me**

Neil’s shoulders shake in a small burst of silent laughter, and he sends Andrew a few quick texts before following Allison back outside.

**Neil: You could feed me if you wanted ;)**

**Andrew: you don’t know what that face means**

**Neil: I do ;)**

**Andrew: stop that**

They make their way towards a small strip of grass with a sign that reads _Hole 1_ propped up against a rock in front of it and Neil stares at it discontentedly. Allison goes first, and she hits her hot-pink golf ball with the perfect amount of speed and aim. It rolls steadily into the hole.

Renee and Seth follow suit, each earning their own hole-in-ones. Neil watches them with an increasing feeling of dread pooling in his stomach. The faded blue grip of his golf club is sticky and peeling off under his palms, which are sweaty despite the early November chill. He’s never so much as held a golf club before under any circumstances, and the one and only time Aaron had offered to take him mini golfing they had both fallen asleep on the couch instead of going.

He doesn’t think the others would laugh at him if he messed up or admitted he’d never done this before, but the irrational fear is there nonetheless.

Renee calls his name softly, and Neil zones back in the see the three of them staring at him expectantly. “Oh,” he says, nervous, “I’ve never done this before.”

Renee smiles at him serenely, and from behind her Seth pipes up to say “That’s okay, man. You just gotta hit the ball with the club.”

Neil knows _that,_ and he’s about to fire a retort when Renee walks towards a rickety wooden bench and Neil actually sees Seth’s face. He’s wearing a genuine smile that looks more like a grimace, but Neil can see the honesty in it. Neil sighs, dropping his green golf ball to the ground in the same spot the others had done, and he lines his club up, winding his arms back and hitting it.

The ball immediately catches air. It soars over a dyed-blue lake and over the fence to the mini golf course, disappearing from view. Neil’s face burns.

“Huh,” Allison says thoughtfully. “You might be good at _actual_ golf.” Renee covers her mouth with her hand, and Seth looks grudgingly impressed.

“I’ll go… get another ball,” Seth says, trotting back towards the main building.

In the meantime, Renee and Allison descend upon Neil, showing him the correct way to hold the club and how to judge the amount of force he needs to hit the ball with. It’s a lot harder than it looks, and he sends a couple more balls into the air—though none are unretrievable like the first. 

Seth comes back with two extra golf balls and a mouthful of bright pink bubble gum, chewing it obnoxiously and throwing in a few pointers here and there. Thankfully the little course is empty, so they don’t need to worry about other people, and the three of them take their time explaining the best methods to Neil, who tries time and time again to hit the ball into the hole with varying degrees of success.

It reaches the point where it’s more frustrating than embarrassing, and Neil is about ready to smash his golf club into the grinning pirate statue when he finally gets it. He lines up perfectly straight, hits the ball solidly, and watches it circle around the hole for a few seconds until it finally drops in. Immediately, Seth and Allison throw their hands up in the air, whooping happily, and Renee claps him on the shoulder proudly. It’s a ridiculous achievement to celebrate, but Neil grins anyways, feeling accomplished.

They work their way around the course, and Neil manages two more hole-in-ones. The man at the front had given them a scorecard, but none of them are keeping track. It’s stupidly fun, and they make up little games as they go, one memorable one being when they’d all hit their balls at the same time and tried to race to the hole like that, which had resulted in nothing but chaos and Neil hunched over on the scratchy grass trying to heave breaths past his laughter.

Once Neil gets the hang of the logistics of it, his remarkable aim does the rest of the work for him, and he wonders if Andrew would be good at this game. Neil thinks he probably would be, if his general good-at-everything err translates well to hitting shit with a club.

When they’ve gone through all eighteen holes and they’ve dropped their clubs and balls back at the front building, they pile back into Allison’s car to head home. They stop for ice cream on the way despite the frozen air, and Neil opts out, instead buying a sealed pint of ‘homemade’ cookies and cream for Aaron to enjoy later.

When he’s finally dropped off at his and Aaron’s apartment, he sighs in relief in the warmth and silence that envelope him, dropping face first onto the couch almost immediately upon entering. He’s exhausted, and he feels like his social battery has been completely drained, even if he did have fun.

Neil hears the shower running, and after a few minutes it shuts off. Neil flips onto his back, frowning. “Why are you taking a shower at 4PM on a Saturday?” he asks Aaron when he emerges from the steamed-up bathroom.

Aaron glares at him, but with a towel wrapped around his waist and hair dripping onto his shoulders it doesn’t feel threatening in the slightest. Neil just grins, waiting for the answer to his question.

Aaron sighs, wringing his hands together in a way he only does when he’s nervous or guilty. Either way, Neil’s own smile drops. “What is it?”

“Well,” Aaron starts, not meeting Neil’s eyes. “Andrew is coming over for dinner.”

Neil tenses immediately, unsure of how he should react. In any other circumstance Neil would be happy to hear about Andrew coming to the apartment, but Aaron still has no idea about the true nature of their relationship and Neil plans to keep in that way for a little bit longer at least. “Oh…” Neil says, trying not to sound suspicious. Aaron seems too stressed out to care. “Why?”

Aaron huffs. “I don’t _know_ ,” he groans dramatically, and despite his sudden nerves, Neil starts to grin again. “I was trying to be a—good brother. And it’s not like I have to worry about keeping you two apart anymore.”

“Sure,” Neil says, pointedly ignoring how his heart skips a beat at hearing the last part. “What are you making?”

Aaron’s hands stop their fiddling before they start up again, more intensely. “He’s the chef…” Aaron says, and Neil actually gasps. He’s not one for traditionalism or mannerisms, but he’s pretty sure making your guest cook their own dinner is a federal crime in some states.

His grin widens, because this is _much_ worse than he ever could have expected, even from Aaron. “So,” Neil begins to summarize. “You invited Andrew to our incredibly messy and tiny apartment for a dinner you’re making him cook?”

Aaron scowls. “He _likes_ to cook,” he insists, before frowning. “I _think_ he likes to cook. Why would he do it all day if he doesn’t like it?”

Neil shrugs, “I guess we’ll find out,” he says ominously.

In a huff, Aaron makes his way into his bedroom, probably in an attempt to make himself look as weirdly professional as possible until Neil makes him put on jeans like a normal person.

Neil knows from Aaron that his and Andrew’s relationship is far from that of normal siblings. Apparently, Aaron and Andrew had been separated shortly after their birth, and Andrew had gone off into the foster system while Aaron stayed with their abusive mother. They had both gotten into trouble, and when they had finally met and been taken in by Nicky, their high school years had been hell with trying to form a stable relationship. It had been about seven years since they’d first been introduced to each other, though, and they’re the best they’ve ever been.

That being said, Aaron is still extremely awkward in the face of his brother’s casual confidence, and it is extremely entertaining to watch.

Despite this, Neil does feel a little embarrassed when he looks at the state of the apartment. The sink has a few dishes in it, and the coffee table is crowded with textbooks and a compilation of various useless shit he doesn’t remember owning. He grabs two empty grocery bags from under the sink and divides the junk into his and Aaron’s piles, dropping his own on his bed to deal with later and hanging Aaron’s on his door.

He looks around the apartment again. Not good, but better. He leaves the dishes for Aaron to deal with—hopefully—but his chest is buzzing with some sort of nervous energy he doesn’t know what to do with. Something about Andrew being in his space is making Neil nervous. Maybe he needs a shower, too.

He grabs his towel from the laundry basket, slinging it over his shoulder and not bothering to bring a change of clothes, since Aaron has already seen his scars countless times before.

Before he steps into the shower he pulls out his phone, navigating his way to his and Andrew’s text conversation and triple-checking that he had the right twin before texting:

**Neil: Operation don’t kiss in front of your brother is a go?**

Neil reaches a hand out to test the temperature of the water, adjusting the temperamental control knobs a little as he waits for Andrew to respond. Not a moment later, Neil’s phone buzzes.

**Andrew: this isn’t a james bond movie**

Neil smiles to himself, feeling that fluttery feeling return to his stomach.

**Neil: It could be… ;)**

**Andrew: how the fuck could that possibly be suggestive?**

**Andrew: i’ll try not to stare at you compromisingly**

**Neil: Gonna be a struggle, Mr. Andrew Bond?**

**Andrew: yes**

The quick reply only widens Neil’s smile, and he steps into the shower to stop himself from sitting on the toilet seat and texting Andrew for the next hour.

Neil takes his time in the shower, letting the hot water rush over his shoulders and release the dormant tension there. He scrubs his skin with one of the exfoliating soap bars Allison had bought him when he had been dragged into a bath store with her, and he uses the coconut shampoo Aaron hates the smell of and Neil loves for that exact reason.

Neil has asked Aaron multiple times what he would do if the love of his life—Katelyn—used coconut shampoo. The devastated look on Aaron’s face is priceless every time.

In the shower, listens to the newest playlist Roland had made for him. The man is getting much better at finding songs fit to Neil’s hidden taste, and the soft notes filtering in through the shower curtain relax his shoulders all on their own.

The songs calm him, and most of them have some sort of underlying instrumentals that make the cords penetrate deeper into his skin, the voices of the singers dreamy and low in a way that reminds Neil of Andrew. He bets Andrew would be a good singer, as well, since he’s apparently frustratingly amazing at everything he does.

Neil sighs when he feels the shower water begin to grow cold, hastily rinsing his hair out and turning off the faucets. He grabs his towel and wraps it around his waist, shaking his hair out and reaching to the doorknob, stopping abruptly.

From the living room, Neil can hear music and chatter. Andrew must be here already, which either means Aaron should have warned him he would be here _soon,_ or that Neil had been in the shower much longer than he’d thought. He glances around the bathroom, searching for anything he might be able to use to cover himself. He starts to wrap the towel around his chest instead before deciding against it. As much as Neil hates his scars and the people who had inflicted them, he tries not to be embarrassed about them any more.

The scars are ugly and mottled across Neil’s skin, but they’re a part of him, and they have been for a long while. If he’s lucky, he’ll be able to sneak through the kitchen without Andrew seeing him anyways, and if he does see him so be it.

Neil walks out of the bathroom with his head held high, pausing only for a moment when he sees the back of Renee’s head from where she’s sitting on the living room armchair. He skitters out of her possible line of sight, shielding himself behind the half-wall separating the living room from the kitchen, sighing out a deep breath of relief. He’s been prepared for Andrew to see his scars, maybe, but not Renee.

“Are you worried Renee is going to eviscerate you?” comes an amused voice from behind him, and Neil whirls around, worried and exposed. The look on Andrew’s face is far from disgust or pity though. In fact, it’s the same, steady stare he always levels Neil with, amused and confident and something Neil can’t describe.

The blonde is set up in front of Neil and Aaron’s tiny kitchen counter, and he’s got a bag of flour half-tipped over a glass bowl. There are ingredients sprawled out around him, and there’s something crackling and popping on the stove. Andrew is wearing all black, as per usual, and there is a fine spray of flour splattered on his tight jeans and tank top. It’s chilly outside, but the heat from the stove is filling the apartment nonetheless, and there is a bead of sweat making its way down Andrew’s forehead from his hairline. Something in the pan on the stove pops, flying into the air and landing on Andrew’s exposed bicep. He doesn’t even blink. Neil’s palms start to sweat.

“No,” is all Neil says, though he feels like he should say more. _Thank you,_ maybe, for not making a big deal out of his scars, but he knows that will only strain things, and he doesn’t know how he could have ever expected anything else from Andrew Minyard.

Andrew opens his mouth, and the atmosphere of the kitchen feels oddly charged with the anticipation of his words, but then Aaron pipes out from the living room. “Are you naked in the kitchen with my brother, Josten?”

Neil’s face burns, and Andrew’s nose goes a little pink, but they both stand their ground. Common enemy and all that. “Yes,” they say, simultaneously, just to hear Aaron sputter.

That strange moment is over, though, and Andrew turns back to his cooking, pouring in a few more shakes of flour without measuring. Neil watches, transfixed for a moment as Andrew pours in a little water and reaches his hand into the bowl to mix, before he remembers that he actually _is_ basically naked in the kitchen with Aaron’s brother.

Neil heads into his room and changes quickly, sending Andrew a text in their brief moment of near-privacy.

**Neil: You look pretty**

Neil’s phone buzzes in his hands only a few seconds later.

**Andrew: shut up**

**Neil: You DO >:(**

**Andrew: cut the sappy shit josten my brother will sniff it out like a bloodhound**

**Neil: I wanna kiss you though**

**Andrew: you should’ve thought of that before you promised him not to date me moron**

**Neil: You’re so sweet to me**

**Andrew: boohoo bitch**

Neil rolls his eyes fondly, and when he comes back to the living room, Aaron and Renee are neck-deep in a conversation about Aaron’s last east sappy date with Katelyn, and he backs out of that before he can be roped into it. He knows far more about Katelyn than he is happy with, which is remarkable seeing as Aaron has only been dating her for a few weeks.

Back in the kitchen, Neil shimmies his way onto the only sliver of counter space remaining, ignoring the glare Andrew sends him for that. Andrew is running a long sheet of dough through a fancy machine he must have brought with him from home, which Neil thinks is extremely amusing considering the fact that Andrew hadn’t even known for sure he would be cooking tonight. He wonders absentmindedly if Andrew keeps kitchen tools in the trunk of his car. Probably.

There are onions growing translucent on the stove, and the scent of garlic and sage surge into the air. Neil breathes it in, leaning his head back on the cabinets and closing his eyes, listening the sounds of Andrew feeding the dough through the machine until Andrew says “Neil,” and he opens them again.

Andrew is standing in the same spot, laden down with an armful of thin pasta dough, staring in contemplation at the machine. “Yes?” Neil asks, just to be a dick.

“Help with this,” Andrew huffs, and Neil grins, sliding off of the counter and coming to stand beside the other man, their shoulders brushing. Neil cranks the handle on the machine as directed, and Andrew feeds the dough through one last time. This time, the machine cuts the dough into perfect strips, and they fold onto the counter in a pile when they come out.

“Aren’t you supposed to be able to do this yourself?” Neil muses, before tacking on a “Chef Andrew,” grinning around the words.

Andrew glares, and his nose is pink from what must be the stuffy heat from the stovetop. “I _can,”_ he says testily, “It’s not my fault your kitchen is the size of a rubix cube.”

Neil chuckles to himself, helping Andrew with the dough until it’s all been cut, and after, Andrew asks him if Neil wants to help him make the sauce. Neil agrees, though he’s not sure why. He despised cooking, and the only reason he ever does it is if it’s his last option. He’d much rather get takeout or make Aaron cook them canned spaghetti-o’s every night, and he doesn’t mind not having delicious food for every meal in the same way Andrew seems to.

Despite this, Neil finds himself having fun cooking with Andrew. When Neil has a few minutes of downtime at work, he finds himself in the kitchen more often than not, watching Andrew cook or stare intently at the ovens or scold Kevin. He likes to watch him now, pulling tomato’s out of a saucepan and expertly peeling the skin off of them despite the fact that they must be boiling hot. He instructs Neil to place them in a jar and mash them up, and Neil complies, trying his best to keep a firm grip on both the jar and his utensil.

“Here,” Andrew says after watching him struggle for a few moments, his voice low. He places one hand around the jar as Neil continues to mash, and they’re suddenly much closer together than Neil had thought they would be. Andrew’s grip is steady around the jar despite Neil’s efforts to jostle it, and the back of his arm brushes up against Neil’s chest with every movement he makes.

Neil sighs in a deep breath, and he can smell Andrew even above the cooking, all cigarette smoke and vanilla. It’s hard to back away, so he doesn’t, even when the tomato has been thoroughly mashed and Andrew is reaching into a plastic grocery bag and pulling out a few different spices. He shakes a few more ingredients into the sauce jar without measuring, and the whole time he does so, he doesn’t pull his hand back, keeping his gentle elbow pressed against Neil’s sternum.

It’s fascinating, to a certain degree, to watch Andrew do this so effortlessly. He doesn’t glance at a recipe once, and he doesn’t even seem to really be focusing on his motions, shaking spices Neil has never even seen before and changing the level on the stovetop every once in a while.

He works quickly, but which a sort of meticulous energy Neil can’t keep track of. The whole dish probably only take thirty minutes start to finish, but Andrew’s movements are steady and calculated the entire time. He never rushes around the kitchen to grab a missed ingredient or make sure something doesn’t boil over, and that calmness is almost as impressive as his general cooking skill.

When Andrew finally plops the now-boiled pasta into the sauce, he looks to Neil expectantly, handing him a long wooden spoon and stepping away from the counter. Neil starts to stir the pasta in the sauce, but even that is more difficult than it looks. Silky sauce spills over the side of the pan and hisses on the hot coils of the stove, and Neil frowns, looking to Andrew.

Andrew grins, “You’re not technically supposed to stir pasta,” he says, leaning in closer to Neil so they’re both crowded around the pan. “But I figured this would be the better thing for you to try.” Andrew’s arm moves slowly until he’s holding Neil’s wrist in his hand gently, guiding the spoon slowly around the edges of the pan first and then through the middle a few times. He leads Neil through it a couple more times before letting go, and Neil copies the muscle memory.

He stirs the pasta for a few more minutes, and Andrew is a steady presence at his side, not backing away even when Neil takes over. Eventually, Andrew picks up the pan by its handle and expertly shuffles it back and forth, tossing the pasta in the sauce. It flies out of the pan precariously, but Andrew doesn’t let a single drop hit the floor—not even when Neil takes a quick glance into the living room and gives him a light press of lips against his bared shoulder. Neil watches, enraptured, until eventually Andrew places the pan back onto the stovetop and Aaron wanders into the kitchen in search of food.

Andrew plates the pasta in a way Neil has seen him do many times at Palmetto’s, but Neil is pretty certain this dish isn’t on the restaurant’s menu. He doesn’t even really know what Andrew had made, since he’d been too caught up in watching him make it to pay attention to the ingredient, though he doubts he would know it even if he had.

Andrew instructs Aaron and Renee to set the table—which is really just putting four forks around the coffee table—and gets to work once again. He uses a fork to twirl the pasta on their plates and grates parmesan on top. He passes the plates off to Neil, who grins and heaves them over his shoulder like he’s carrying trays at Palmetto’s, serving them to Renee and Aaron. “Would you two like anything else for today?” Neil asks sarcastically, earning him a hard jab into his ribs from Aaron and a quick smile from Renee.

Neil brings in the other two plates and settles down between Aaron and Andrew, with Renee across from him, wondering if it would be weird for him to shuffle closer to Aaron so he isn’t tempted to hold Andrew’s hand under the coffee table. He doesn’t, and he thinks he should start to pride himself more on his self restraint. They settle on the floor around the coffee table and dig into their dinner, none of them feeling the need to make conversation.

When they’re all done and their plates are empty, Renee politely thanks Andrew and Neil for cooking, and Aaron makes some sort of vague grunting noise Neil knows to take as approval. They migrate to the couch and armchair so they can lay out comfortably, and Neil sets up his new playlist on the fancy Bluetooth speaker Matt had convinced him to get at the mall one day as Renee and Andrew start up a conversation about the health benefits of apple cider vinegar.

Soft sounds fill the room, and the clatter of plates draw his attention back to Aaron, where he is attempting to pile the plates up into his arms. Andrew also notices, apparently, because a moment later he scoffs and asks, “You’ve already forgotten how to be a waiter?”

Aaron hands one of the plates off to Neil, who takes it without complaint. “ _No_ ,” he says, “I’m just rusty.”

Andrew shakes his head, stretching his arms over his head and leaning back in the chair. “Sure,” he allows, “If you were carrying trays like _that_ though it’s no wonder you were fired.”

Aaron sputters incredulously, and Neil shoots a hand out to catch a tumbling fork before it can hit the ground, not missing the way Andrew’s eyes track his movements. “I wasn’t _fired—,_ ” Aaron starts protesting as Neil begins to push him back into the kitchen.

The two of them clean up the minimal mess in the kitchen quickly, Aaron collecting the dishes and handing them off to Neil to wash. In the living room, Neil hears the volume on the Bluetooth speaker bump up a few levels, and he glances behind the half-wall to see Andrew and Renee swaying together in the small bit of free space in front of the TV.

Renee is leaning against Andrew, her arms wrapped around his shoulders, and Andrew has his elbows over Renee’s own shoulders as well. The music Neil had put on is slow and light, and Andrew’s eyes are closed happily as he dances with Renee. She leans against Andrew, and the man supports her weight easily.

Neil can’t even begin to explain the relief he feels knowing that Andrew and Renee feel nothing more than platonic admiration for each other. Only a few days ago the sight of the two of them dancing like that would have probably put him in a bad mood for the rest of the night. Even so… Neil wants to dance with Andrew like that now. He wants to kiss Andrew’s cheek and talk to his best friend about how much he liked talking to his brother. He wants Aaron to stop being weird about the possibility of Andrew and Neil together. He wishes he’d told Aaron to fuck off that night after the arcade and hadn’t made an accidental promise he feels like he can’t break despite its pointlessness.

Neil scrubs the dishes aggressively, ignoring the concerned looks Aaron keeps sending him.

The other man leans against the kitchen counter, but Neil can’t keep his eyes from glancing into the living room when he tries to meet his friend’s in reassurance instead. Renee giggles happily as Andrew dips her, and Neil smiles a little, content to see Andrew and his best friend so happy.

Eventually, Aaron and Neil head back into the living room, where Andrew is now settled into the armchair with a small quirk of his lips as he watches Renee dance by herself to a slightly more upbeat song. Neil watches the man’s face, cataloguing his minute expressions until Andrew notices his stares and meets his eyes.

Neil’s breath catches. He lives with Aaron, and he knows what his best friend’s eyes look like very well. And yet… Andrew’s eyes bore into Neill’s with such intensity that he feels it like a physical thing. Neil doesn’t know what to do with it: the force of his feelings for Andrew and the weight of the secret they’re keeping from Aaron. The confusion. The complications of everything.

Neil sighs, dropping his head back and letting his eyes slip closed, needing to break eye contact with Andrew before he combusts.

Renee proposes a game of charades, and for some reason everyone agrees. They find an app on Renee’s phone and crowd together on the couch. Aaron goes first, and he taps a button on the phone to start the game, frantically looking around the room for something to use before just making a general gesture to himself.

Andrew is his partner, and he doesn’t waste any time with his guesses. “Idiot,” he begins, monotone, ignoring his brother’s glare. “Stupid, dumbass, asshole,” he continues, staring blankly at Aaron when he just continues to make the same gesture. “I don’t know,” Andrew says, and the timer on the app runs out, making a loud buzzing noise.

Aaron sighs, glaring. “Man,” he says, dropping onto the couch beside Neil. He pats his friend’s arm in consolation.

Andrew just shrugs, settling back into the couch cushions and saying “It’s not my fault you’re bad at this game.”

Renee goes next, and after some debate Neil is able to guess she’s trying to be a butterfly. Neil and Renee get a point, and she high-fives him on her way back to the armchair.

Eventually, they decide to switch teams, and Neil and Aaron are up against Andrew and Renee. It’s a very close match, since they all know their teammates so well. Andrew manages to guess the word _toaster_ from Renee only making a hand gesture, and Aaron guesses _anatomy_ from Neil pretending to prop over the window—a reference to the textbook Neil always uses to keep it open—but in the end Andrew and Renee win. Aaron had tried to mime _bicycle_ and done a face plant instead, and Neil had been laughing too hard to try to guess.

Andrew makes them all hot chocolates and tea, and they sit around the coffee table watching some reality show Renee likes to make fun of.

It’s fun, and Neil enjoys the feeling of calm contentment floating through the air. He’s getting sleepy, struggling to keep his eyes open, and he leans to the left, where Aaron is usually sitting. Andrew tenses under him for a second, and Neil tries to scramble away when he realizes his mistake, only to be stopped by the firm curl of Andrew’s forearm over his chest. Neil settles back down, leaning his back into Andrew’s side despite his better judgement and playing the casual-ness of it off by kicking his legs up into Aaron’s lap on the other side of the couch as well.

The room is dim, the only light from the flickering floor lamp and the glowing streetlights outside the windows, and Andrew is a solid presence behind him, keeping him steady and right-side up. He can feel the man’s breathing echoed throughout his own body, and Neil falls asleep easily to the gentle sighs of breath and quiet humming of the TV.

Some time later, Neil wakes up facing the opposite direction. He blinks up at Aaron confused, and Aaron just blinks right back. Andrew’s voice cuts through the silence from somewhere above them, and Neil finally sits up, looking around. Andrew has an arm wrapped around Renee’s shoulders, and she’s leaning against him easily as they make their way to the door.

At the sounds of shifting, Andrew looks back at them, grinning. “The sleepyheads are awake, I see,” he says, stopping in front of the apartment door. “It’s late and we’re going home. You’re welcome for dinner.” He glances over his brother, who is yawning into the crook of his elbow, before his eyes lock on Neil. “See you tomorrow,” he says, opening the door and helping Renee through it. She laughs sleepily, waving back at Aaron and Neil, and Neil looks away, needing to focus on stopping himself from running over to the door and giving Andrew a goodbye kiss. Or hug. Or _something_. He hadn’t anticipated the amount of restraint not touching Andrew around Aaron would take.

He tries not to think about how he had fallen asleep against Andrew. About how badly he’d wanted to stay there and wrap his arms around Andrew’s neck for a kiss. How he’d woken up sleeping against Aaron instead, meaning Andrew must have tried very hard to not wake him. Tries not to think about Andrew’s eyes on him throughout the night, or about the warmth of him against his back. About the warmth he’d felt in his stomach while he watched Andrew cook.

So really, Neil just tries not to think at all. He switches the TV and bullies Aaron into getting ready for bed. They brush their teeth together at their tiny sink in silence, and shove each other lazily out of the way to spit the toothpaste out of their mouths. Aaron starts peeing in the toilet before Neil can leave the room, and Neil glares at the back of his head in the bathroom mirror, making his way to his bedroom after spitting out the water he’d used to rinse his mouth.

Neil collapses face-first onto his bed, only picking his head off his pillow when he hears his neglected phone buzz on the nightstand.

**Andrew: this sucks and i hate you**

**Andrew: and my brother**

**Andrew: fuck aaron**

Neil laughs despite himself, relieved that at least Andrew was suffering along with him tonight.

**Neil: Fuck Aaron**

**Neil: I’ll talk to him about it soon**

**Andrew: okay**

**Andrew: goodnight neil**

**Neil: Goodnight Andrew :)**

**Andrew: >:(**

Neil sets his phone back on the night table and curls up on himself under the covers. He’s going to need a serious amount of Andrew kisses tomorrow to make up for this night.

He really hopes Aaron doesn’t make this harder than it needs to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the lack of kisses but you had to suffer along with andreil lol
> 
> I hope you enjoyed the chapter! Next week will bring some more Andreil-centered scenes and lots and lots of sneaking + kissies I promise
> 
> Comments make me very happy! :]


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just some soft andreil loving and some light sneaks around the best friend!!

Things don’t get easier from there. Neil nearly has a heart attack when Aaron brings up Andrew in a conversation, and skirting around the man in question is proving to be a greater challenge as the days go on. Especially since Neil and Andrew have only gotten closer since their first kiss and even since Andrew and Renee’s impromptu visit to Aaron and Neil’s apartment.

Neil had never expected to become so enraptured with another person. It’s hard to even look at Andrew anymore without wanting to touch him, and being in the same space as him without being able to reach out and entwine their hands is something akin to torture. It’s terrifying, but Neil wouldn’t trade that—that feeling of helplessness affection and bone-deep admiration—for anything.

“Andrew,” Neil whines, propping his chin in the palm of his hand and looking up at his… Andrew. Aaron’s got an exam to study for at the library, and he’d explicitly told Neil not to go anywhere near him for the next six hours so he can ‘actually get shit done’, so Neil had taken that as the opportunity to show Andrew his room for the first time. 

Neil still isn’t much for decoration, but even he can admit that his room looks a lot better that it had when he’d first moved in with Aaron. He has a few colorful quilts Renee had knitted for him, a full closet thanks to his uncle Stuart and Allison, a Bluetooth speaker he’d stolen from Aaron, and a collection of fairy lights he’d strung up along the outlines of the windows. Sure, he’s still got the rickety old nightstand, and his mattress is still on a boxspring on the wooden floor, but he thinks that gives the room character. 

Andrew does not agree. He’d taken one look at the nightstand and just shook his head, and he’d insisted that Neil at least buy a wooden support for his bed to match the aesthetic of his room—whatever that means. He’d collapsed on the bed and pulled out his phone to show Neil a few photos of them on Pinterest—Neil laid out with his back pressed against Andrew’s chest and their legs intertwined—and Neil had agreed to go shopping for one sometimes soon.

“Neil,” Andrew responds distractedly, bumping the volume of the Twitch stream he’d been forcing Neil to watch with him down a couple notches. With his other hand, Andrew doesn’t pause from where he’s gently tracing the edges of Neil’s eyebrow with his pointer finger. 

“What do we do about Aaron?” Neil asks, shifting a little until he’s comfortable against Andrew’s chest again, his ear pressed to the soft material of Andrew’s armband.

Neil feels Andrew shrug his shoulders noncommittally. “Tell him,” he suggests.

Neil groans, and Andrew taps his fingers against his brow bone a few times in thought. “But he’s gonna be mad,” Neil whines. “I don’t like it when he’s mad at me. One time I forgot to go to meet him for lunch and he didn’t talk to me for a week. Can you imagine how petty he would be if he found out I was dating his brother after I promised him I wouldn’t?”

Andrew taps his fingertips a little harder. “Then we won’t tell him.” Neil groans again, but Andrew just continues with “You dug yourself this grave, Josten. I’ll help you out of the pit but I’m not going to apologize to Aaron for you,” he trails off. “You shouldn’t have promised him. Or—you shouldn’t have broken the promise without telling him first.”

Neil’s first response with anyone else would be to defend himself—in his defense, he  _had_ been extremely tired and confused when he’d made that promise—but with Andrew he knows better. He knows about how much Andrew values honesty—remembers how Andrew had looked at him when he’d first told him about his promise to Aaron without thinking much of it. “I know,” is all Neil says in the end, and then “Will you tell me about it now?”

He’s talking about Andrew and Aaron’s relationship, in general, and he doesn’t have to specify that for Andrew to understand. Neil had tried to ask about it when he’d first told Andrew about the promise, but Andrew had’t been in the right mindset to talk about it then. 

Now though… “There’s not much you don’t know,” Andrew says. “We grew up apart and Nicky raised us together from our first year of high school after his mom overdosed. Aaron was homophobic and I hated that it bothered me. I was apathetic and he hated that it bothered him. We made dumb promises to each other that he didn’t realize meant anything to me. He broke his promise to me by dating this girl—he can’t even remember her name now—and I got pissed. It was a lot of bickering and dumb fights, and eventually we worked through it, but that doesn’t mean Aaron’s not still very protective over who he considers  _his_ now, and that doesn’t mean that I’m not still the same way.

“He doesn’t want me to take anyone else away from him, and I don’t want to share the people I trust. We’re working on it, but you just so happen to fall into both of those categories—I told Aaron I’m into you because we’re trying to be good brothers and communicate, Aaron flipped out a little and you made him a stupid promise that you didn’t understand. Complications arose. Now here we are.”

It’s a lot to process, since Neil’s never heard Andrew’s point of view of that story before, but Neil’s mind sticks to one important detail. “You told Aaron you liked me?”

Neil can’t see it, but he swears he can  _feel_ Andrew’s scowl. “Shut up,” he says, poking his pinky finger into Neil’s ribs.

Neil just smiles. “You told Aaron you liked me,” he repeats teasingly. “The day of the arcade? Andrew that was  _months_ ago.”

Andrew grunts in annoyed confirmation and switches his phone off, dropping it beside them on the bed. “Yes or no?”

Neil’s thoughts stutter to a stop and his teasing smile drops instantly at the low timbre of those particular words. “Yes.”

Andrew grabs his waist with one hand and his wrist with the other and swiftly changes their positions until Neil is flat on the bed and Andrew is hovering over him, propped on his elbows. Neil grins up a him, and Andrew switches to one elbow so he can cover his mouth with his palm. “Shut up,” he repeats, before lowering down further somehow, moving his hand from Neil’s mouth to cup the side of his face. “I won’t deny it. I knew that I wanted you since the day I met you.”

Neil’s breath stutters a little. “Oh,” he says, and Andrew smirks, pressing a gentle kiss to his mouth. “Aaron knew you liked me and that’s why he asked me that?”

“Yeah,” Andrew says, cocking his head a little to the side, and then “I don’t want to talk about my brother anymore.”

Neil huffs out a quiet laugh. “Me neither,” he admits, before he has to throw his head back as Andrew begins to nip bites and kisses along the column of his throat.

He gets lost in Andrew easily, returning the favor with neck kisses of his own and enjoying the way Andrew shutters a little on top of him. Neil asks a quiet question against the sensitive skin and receives the go-ahead to touch Andrew above the hips, wasting no time in gripping the man’s shoulder blades and tugging him back into another kiss. 

It’s easy like this, which is something Neil can’t say about much else in his life at the moment. It’s easy to kiss Andrew until he feels like he can’t breathe. It’s easy to pant his name into the fickle space between them when Andrew brings his hips down onto Neil’s own. It’s easy to let Andrew work them both over until they’re kissing lazily and too tired to do anything more than that.

It’s easy right up until keys jingle in the door and Aaron’s voice echoes against the walls of the seemingly empty apartment. “Neil,” he calls out. “Are you still home?”

Neil doesn’t think twice before he’s shoving Andrew off the bed until he’s squished into the space between the mattress and the white-painted wall. Andrew grunts, more than a little disgruntled, but he doesn’t try to get up and merely accepts it when Neil throws a blanket over his body sloppily just as Aaron knocks on his bedroom door. “Neil?”

Neil hurriedly glances around the room for any possible Andrew identifiers. He throws another blanket on Andrew’s shoes and bags and clears the tissues on the nightstand into the trash can. “Come in,” he calls out, too loudly. 

The door cracks open, and Aaron’s blonde head peaks inside the small gap. “Neil,” he greets with a smile, and Neil tries his best to mask his guilt. “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” Neil lies seamlessly, trying not to pull his hair out. He’s good at it, but that doesn’t mean he likes lying to his best friend. “You all done studying?”

Aaron hums sleepily. “Yeah,” he says, hefting his backpack on his shoulder a little. “Just letting you know I’m back. I need to shower, but we should watch a movie after, yeah? It’s been a while since we did something just the two of us.”

Neil smiles earnestly despite the pissed-off pile of Andrew squashed between the wall and the mattress not a foot away from him. “Sure,” he allows. “I’ll make popcorn while you’re showering.”

“Okay,” Aaron yawns. “I might not make it through the whole thing. I’m tired as fuck.”

Neil hums. “That’s okay,” he says, relieved as Aaron turns to walk away. “Don’t pass out in the shower, old man,” Neil teases, because it feels like the right thing to do.

Aaron scoffs, but he just closes the door behind himself, the shower Turing on not even a full minute later.

Neil glances to his right, where Andrew is glaring up at him from the floor, his hair a mess and the blanket still half-covering him. Neil smiles at him guiltily. “Sorry,” he says. 

Andrew just sighs, “The things I do for you, Josten,” and huffs as he grabs his shoes and begins shoving them on.

“I  _am,_ ” Neil insists, helping Andrew into his backpack and doing a quick sweep of the apartment just to make sure Aaron is actually in the shower. “I would walk you out. But um—yeah.”

Andrew nods, kissing him on the cheek before he walks out of the apartment, leaving Neil to shut the door quietly behind him.

Neil goes into the kitchen to microwave some popcorn. If keeping this thing a secret is for the best then why does it feel like he’s just making things worse by doing so?

~

Neil finally picks up Jean’s call on his Saturday afternoon lunch break, sprawled lazily across the bench out the back door of Palmetto’s and halfway through a basket of the delicious dinner rolls he’d snagged from the kitchen.

He tries to be casual about it—they were still friends, after all, and Neil has been  _busy_ —but the silence that rings out as soon as he picks up is loud. Neil can hear the gentle breeze fluttering around him and the chirp of birds and shifting of clothes from across the line. He can imagine the sour scent of the rolled cigarettes Jean used to smoke, hidden in the folds of his winter jacket and between the tufts of his wind-blown hair. Kevin had told him the other week that Jean is trying to kick the habit.

Neil can hear Jean’s breathing, and he lets out his own little sigh into the speaker before clearing his throat. “Jean,” he says, aiming for easygoing and landing somewhere between stressed and sad.

“Neil,” he hears Jean’s voice return, and then suddenly he doesn’t know where to go from there. Thankfully, or maybe not, Jean continues. “I’ve been calling.”

“Yeah,” Neil sighs, tracing the toe of his sneaker in the rocky soil beneath the bench. “I kept meaning to call back.”

Jean is silent, so Neil stays silent as well. In the doorway, Andrew appears, likely on break as well. He leans against the doorframe easily, lighting a cigarette and raising a questioning brow in Neil’s direction. Neil mouths  _Jean_ and Andrew wrinkles his nose a little. Neil fights to hide his amusement, going for admonishing instead and likely failing if the slight quirk of Andrew’s mouth is anything to go by. Andrew has a dislike of Jean for a reason unbeknownst to Neil.

Andrew keeps his distance, smoking silently and scrolling through his phone, and Neil nearly forgets about the phone call entirely until he hears Jean say, quietly “Sorry.”

Neil lifts the phone away from his cheek in confusion. “What?” Neil asks, “Why?”

Jean huffs another sigh, the speaker crackling under the sudden influx of noise. “I think we should meet up. Next Friday,” he says, and Neil blinks in surprise. That was out of nowhere—he and Jean haven’t talked about meeting again in months, and Neil hasn’t seen the man in person since high school. 

“I—” Neil starts, at a loss. Andrew glances up at him curiously, but Neil just waves off his concern. “Okay,” he says simply.

“Okay,” Jean repeats, before hanging up.

Neil sets his phone back in his lap and stares at it. 

“Neil?” Andrew asks, his cigarette completely burned out now. “What was that about?”

Neil looks up at Andrew. “I don’t know,” he admits.

Andrew huffs.

~

“Ugh,” Neil groans as he bursts into the kitchen at Palmetto’s, immediately making his way over to Andrew who is chopping onions at a pace far too quick and impressive for Neil to comprehend.

Andrew doesn’t look up from his task. “Oh yeah?”

Neil nods despite being alone in the kitchen aside from Andrew, who still isn’t even looking at him. He leans against the counter beside Andrew, watching his side profile intently. “Some lady out there wants me to tell you to remake this dish without dairy.”

Andrew slowly looks down at the plate of baked mac and cheese and then back up at Neil. “What,” he deadpans, and Neil can’t help but grin despite his frustration. 

“That’s what I said, too. I told her that there’s no way you could possibly do that but she was insistent. She’s on the phone with Wymack now.”

Andrew scoffs. “As if he’s going to do anything about that. He’s in his office and he didn’t even bother coming out.”

Neil glances over at the office, spying Wymack at his desk through the half-open door. The man’s eyebrows are scrunched in confused irritation, and he looks like he’s trying his best not to shout across the line. Neil can relate.

Neil watches Andrew slide the diced onions off the cutting board with the back of his knife, leaving them to sizzle in a pan for however long it takes onions to cook. He scrapes the plate of baked mac and cheese into the trash bin unhappily—it’s a waste of perfectly good food, but Andrew would probably get in trouble if Neil just served the same dish right back to the angry woman.

Andrew moves the onions around in the pan with a spatula, and Neil comes up beside him to lean against the countertop, placing a hand on Andrew’s elbow just to feel his warmth. Andrew glances over at him, his forehead shiny from the heat of the kitchen and his hair restricted by a net. He looks messy and tired and competent—he is truly in his element here, with smoking pans in front of him and four different operations to keep track of at once.

Neil opens his mouth to say something, but Wymack beats him to it, clearing his throat and causing both Neil and Andrew to look over at him quickly. The man is stood in the doorway to the office, shirt untucked and the laces on his left shoe untied, looking every bit of the man Neil had known from his childhood who would take him and Kevin out to baseball games and CiCi’s Pizza. “Ahem,” he grunts, looking pointedly at where Neil’s hand still cups Andrew’s elbow.

Neil removes his hand, taking a sheepish step away from Andrew. “Yes?”

Wymack narrows his eyes, but he just shakes his head quietly. “No PDA in the kitchen,” he says, and Andrew rolls his eyes.

“It’s hardly PDA,” says Andrew lazily, his fingertips twitching on the countertop restlessly. “Although I’m sure you must have forgotten what affection is like by now, old man, so I won’t blame you.”

Wymack grunts again. “Shut your trap, Minyard,” he says, but his voice is fond. “I’ll hire someone else to replace you if I need to.”

Andrew just hums, says “No, you won’t,” and starts moving the onions again.

Wymack throws his hands up in obvious exasperation, but he doesn’t deny Andrew’s claim.

~

Neil lays out on his stomach on Andrew’s bed, resting his worksheet on the flat surface of his notebook as he works through a few math questions for his next class. He’s been busy these last few days; with work and classes… and Andrew, so he’s hardly had any time to get his homework done. He’d come straight to Andrew and Renee’s after his final class of the day, letting out a quick  _thank you_ to whoever made his work schedule this week for his day off. As much as he likes working at Palmetto’s, Neil is only human, and his days off are still some of the best days. 

He’d been excited to spend the night in with Aaron—they haven’t been having much quality friendship time since Aaron and Katelyn (and Neil and Andrew) had gotten together. Neil understands, of course—he’s guilty of it himself, since he’s definitely been spending a lot of time with Andrew these last few weeks—but that doesn’t stop him from feeling a little bitter towards the woman taking up all of his friend’s time.

Aaron had texted him as Neil made the trek back to their apartment, though, and told Neil that he and Katelyn are watching a movie tonight at the apartment. He’d invited Neil, but he would honestly rather not be in the same vicinity as Aaron and his girlfriend in a dim room. Neil sighs to himself, scribbling out the answer to the messy equation he’d been working on and moving on to the next one.

Neil lets himself get lost in the equations, pushing aside all of his other issues to deal with another time. He always tells people that this is the reason he enjoys math so much—this feeling of accomplishment he feels now as he works through the problems, burning his way through the first worksheet in just under an hour. He gets started on the next sheet right away, not willing to let himself get distracted and lose his focus.

He’s about halfway through his last worksheet when Neil hears the lock on Andrew and Renee’s apartment door slide open, the creaky thing whining on its hinges. Neil wonders which of the two are back so soon, but he doesn’t look up from his worksheet, determined to get it done before it’s due in his 8AM class tomorrow. He yawns, and he doesn’t stray his attention from the worksheet even as he hears Andrew clear his throat from the doorframe. “Neil,” he says lowly.

Neil grins at his worksheet, not stopping his pencil as he continues to work out his problems, only a little distracted now. “Yeah?”

The floorboards creak as Andrew steps further into his room, and Neil watches the man from the corner of his eye, trying to keep his focus on his nearly-complete homework to no avail. In the corner Andrew drops his work bag, not hesitating as he peels his shirt over his head and unbuttons his black work pants, dropping them in a pile in the corner. Neil hurriedly returns his attention to his worksheet, trying not to listen to the sounds of Andrew moving around in the corner, presumably getting re-dressed in some comfy clothes. 

Neil had been given a key to Andrew and Renee’s apartment not long after this thing had started, and Neil has long since memorized the jut of its teeth on the bruising skin of his thumb, leaving indents he wishes he could tattoo there. That sort of trust is something that Neil thinks he will truly never get over, no matter how long it’s been since he found a home or how many times Andrew calls him an obsessed idiot. 

The key means a lot to him, and after he’d gotten over the initial shock and confusion of receiving it, it had proven itself quite useful. Being able to let himself into Andrew and Renee’s usually blissfully silent apartment was proving to be insanely helpful to Neil’s mentality as Aaron enters exam week. Neil can only deal with so much insane medical nonsense being spewed at him from every direction.

Plus, Neil thinks as he feels the bed shift with Andrew’s weight, it allows for easy interactions with Andrew without the need to sneak around. Aside from Seth—unfortunately—Renee is the only one who knows about the true nature of Neil and Andrew’s relationship, and it’s surprisingly relieving to be able to sit pressed against Andrew’s side on the couch around another human and not having to worry about either being bombarded with questions or straight-up throttled. 

Neil looks at Andrew out of the corner of his eye and spots him laying face-up on the bed next to him, eyes closed and mouth relaxed. Neil sets his pencil down momentarily, and it’s moments like these that he wishes his memory was as good as Andrew’s—he wants to keep this image of Andrew safe in his mind forever. 

Neil sighs to himself quietly and picks his pencil back up—he needs to get this last worksheet done before he can allow himself to spend so much time staring at Andrew. 

He’s worked his way through about half of the equations by the time Andrew presumably gets bored enough to do something other than lay in silence. Andrew shifts gradually closer to Neil as the minutes go by, and Neil pretends not to notice as he scribbles his way down the page, only stopping with a soft  _oof_ when Andrew fully rolls over so his entire weight is resting on Neil, his stomach pressed snuggly to Neil’s back.

“Hello,” Neil says, his voice slightly strained. 

Andrew places his head in the crook of Neil’s neck. “Mmff,” he says eloquently. 

Neil grins, putting his pencil down once again, worksheet completely forgotten now. “You know,” he starts. “If you wanted attention you could have just said something.”

Andrew grunts again. “And give you the satisfaction? Never.”

Neil shivers as he feels Andrew begin to press kisses up the back of his neck. “I feel pretty good about this situation, too,” he admits. 

Andrew remains silent aside from a hushed “Yes or no?”

“Yes,” Neil sighs, voice breathy and happy. 

Andrew slides a hand under the collar of Neil’s stretched-out t-shirt, his cool palm flat against the heated skin. He pulls the collar back even more, giving Neil a small kiss on his shoulder. Neil pushes his papers and supplies to the side with a lazy swipe of his arm and crosses his arms over each other in front of himself, laying his forehead in the circle of them. He lets his eyes flutter gently closed as Andrew slowly works his hands under the hem of Neil’s t-shirt, lifting the soft material further up his back until it’s pooled around his neck and armpits.

Andrew’s worn and calloused hands slide over the sensitive skin of his back like a whisper of wind. He scratches gently along his shoulder blades and presses his thumbs firmly into the small of his back. He kneads his palms over the soft skin of Neil’s hips and traces light fingertips over the sparse scars there. It’s a lot, and Neil feels his eyes start to sting acutely at the easy way Andrew touches him.

Andrew’s lips graze their way up Neil’s spine and end their adventure where Neil’s neck meets his head. Neil feels safe and cared for under the evenly distributed weight of Andrew pressed against him, and his eyes grow heavier and heavier by the second. He vaguely notices Andrew shifting down a little and dropping his head between Neil’s shoulder blades before he succumbs to the swift undertaking of sleep.

~

Neil wakes up to the annoying drone of his ringtone in his ear. He groans unhappily when it doesn’t stop, and he feels Andrew roll off of him, his back suddenly all too light and cold. “Wha—” he starts, looking to the side and meeting Andrew’s sleep-blurred eyes with his own. 

Andrew picks Neil’s phone off the bed, and Neil looks away guiltily when he sees Aaron’s name on the display. It’s half-passed 11pm by now, and he’s got to be wondering where Neil is. 

The call times out, and Andrew puts the phone back on the bed. “If you don’t tell him soon, I will,” he says quietly. 

Neil sighs, the stress Andrew’s weight had removed seeping back into his shoulders. “I will tell him,” Neil promises. “After I meet with Jean, I will.”

Andrew traces the backs of his knuckles over Neil’s still-bared spine. “I’ll hold you to it,” he says, and Neil smiles a little despite the situation at the disapproving tone of Andrew’s voice. He’ll never admit it, but he cares about Aaron more than anything.

Neil sits up on his knees finally, his shirt falling back into place and his spine popping satisfyingly. He kisses Andrew’s clothed shoulder once. “Okay.”

He sends Aaron a lazy text about staying with Matt for the night, changes into a pair of Andrew’s sweatpants, and gets back into bed, smiling when Andrew wraps himself around his back. 

He’ll tell Aaron soon enough, and he privately hopes that Aaron doesn’t make a big deal out of this. 

Neil doesn’t know what he would do if he did. All he knows as he falls back asleep to Andrew’s thumb rubbing absentminded circles on his hip is that he’s not about to let anything mess this up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> notice how neil is happy!!! You were all so worried haha it’s _fine _:) wait no don’t look at the chapter count no don’t do it you’re so sexy haha...__
> 
> _  
> _In all seriousness i hope you guys liked this chapter!! See you next Wednesday >:)_  
> _
> 
> _  
> _Comments are very greatly appreciated!_  
> _


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWS for this chapter:   
> mentions/allusions to past depression  
> panic attacks  
> mentions of scars (Neil’s and self-inflicted)  
> mention of vomiting  
> mentions/allusions to past physical and mental abuse (Neil). 
> 
> Lmk if you need specifics and enjoy the chapter >:)

Neil wakes up with a headache and the jittery feeling of his phone vibrating against his skull. His brain is fuzzy and half-awake as he tugs his arm out from under Andrew’s and fishes his phone out from under his pillow, silencing it without bothering to look at the screen.

It’s far too early to bother with anything yet, and the warmth of Andrew against the line of his spine is enough to keep him anchored to this spot for the foreseeable future. Neil closes his eyes again, but sleep eludes him now, the slashes of sunlight probing through the blinds pierce lines across the thin skin of his eyelids, and his back feels like it needs to pop in ten different places. He stretches his arms out in front of him, his shoulders loosening easily. Andrew tugs Neil closer by the arm he has wrapped around his waist, and Neil smiles a little into the pillow.

They’d had a late night the day before. Neil had come to Andrew’s after a long day at work and they’d made the stupid decision to stay up and watch a few Twitch streams—Andrew has unfortunately converted Neil into enjoying them—and they hadn’t fallen asleep until nearly 4 in the morning. 

Neil shifts a little deeper into the covers, tucking his arm safely back inside the cocoon of warmth and letting out a quiet sigh, laying still and staring at the wall in contemplation. After a few moments of empty silence, Neil finally relents and checks his phone for the time. 

It’s nearing midday, which isn’t surprising considering how late they’d gone to bed. His stomach aches a little at the reminder of the hour, but his appetite disappears again when he sees the alarm he’d silenced nearly twenty minutes ago now.

**Lunch w/ Jean @12** it reads ominously. 

**11:45** reads the clock at the top of Neil’s screen, perhaps even more ominously.

“Shit,” mutters Neil. 

He slides out of bed hastily, tugging off his sweatpants and shoving his legs into a pair of faded black jeans. Andrew groans discontentedly, throwing a hand over his eyes and stretching out on the bed. Neil rushes to the bathroom to brush his teeth and compose himself a little more in the mirror, and when he returns to Andrew’s room Andrew is sitting up on the bed, staring at him grumpily. “What the hell?” he asks, eyes blurry and confused. 

“I’m late,” Neil offers, pulling one of Andrew’s hoodies over his hole-y t-shirt and downing the half-empty glass of water on the nightstand as Andrew’s eyes follow him curiously. “Jean.”

Andrew flops back on the bed dramatically. “Oh,” he says “him.”

Neil rolls his eyes. “Have you even met him?”

Andrew glares. “Yes,” he grumbles. “Once.”

Neil buttons and zips the jeans he’d shoved on and tugs socks on one by one. “And you just decided to hate him, then?”

Andrew sits back up again and walks over to a pile of clothes covering his desk chair. “Yes,” he says simply.

Andrew fishes a heavy black winter jacket from the mess and passes it over to Neil. “Why?” Neil asks him as he takes it, making no move to wear it.

Andrew points at the jacket in silence until Neil huffs and puts it on, nodding approvingly. “He’s Kevin’s best friend,” he says. “No person in their right mind would spend that much time with Kevin.”

Neil grins, stomach growing warm when Andrew picks up his car keys from the desk and shoves them into Neil’s hand. “Aww,” Neil teases “you’re jealous of him for taking up all your Kevin time?”

Andrew shoulders past him into the living room. “Not even a little,” he grumps as he makes his way into the kitchen.

“Sure,” Neil allows. “See you after.” 

Andrew grunts noncommittally, and Neil makes his way out of the apartment. He has to shove his hands into his pockets to protect them from the biting cold as soon as the freezing air hits them, and he’s suddenly grateful that Andrew had made him put on a jacket even for such a short trip. 

He maneuvers the car to the main road and sets out on track for Palmetto’s. He and Jean had exchanged a few texts about a time and place a few days after the initial phone call, but they had been dry and quipped along the edges. Neil truly has no idea what Jean could want to get out of this meet up, but he’s been trying to convince Jean to see him since Freshman year of college so he’s not complaining. 

He parks the car in the back parking spaces of Palmetto’s despite technically being a customer, and he sighs in relief when he glances at the clock on the center console and sees he’s only a few minutes late.

He half-walks, half-jogs to the back doors and closes them soundly behind himself against the frozen wind. It’s Andrew’s rare day off, so Erik and Kevin are working the kitchen, stirring pots of soup and checking oven times. Despite this knowledge, Neil still glances around the space in search of Andrew, checking for him on the tops of counters and the crack of the pantry doors. It’s strange to see the place Neil thinks of as the most  _Andrew-like_ so devoid of him.

He says a brief  _hello_ to his friends that are working and makes his way into the main room, spotting Jean instantly among the mess of the lunch rush. 

Neil tries not to let his footsteps stutter at the sight of seeing his friend after so long, but he isn’t successful. Jean’s sitting at a small table in the corner, back to the wall and spine hunched over. His ankles are crossed one over the other under his chair, and his hands fiddle ceaselessly with the hem of his sweater. 

Neil remembers nights at Riko’s enormous house when Jean would splay his delicate hands over the keys of the grand piano and play the opening song to  _Howl’s Moving Castle._ Neil remembers the silence and stillness of those moments—moments that made Riko’s bullying and pettiness worth it, if only to have met a best friend.

It had all been stripped away, so soon, for so long, and Neil doesn’t know if he’s enough to get it back. Doesn’t know what Jean wants now. Doesn’t know if he’d invited him here to call him out or to rekindle their friendship or to tell him to fuck off one last time. Doesn’t know if Jean even remembers those moments Neil thinks so fondly of now—Jean on the piano bench in the Moriyama’s empty mansion while Kevin and Riko played outside, Neil sitting on his hands next to him, unwilling to accidentally brush against the keys and break the rythm.

Neil hears the music move through his mind now, the notes swaying and swirling with the breeze. He wonders if Jean would play it again for him now. He wonders if Jean even still remembers how to play it.

Neil draws closer to the table, and Jean’s eyes flash up to meet his, dark as his raven hair and pitch-black sweater. Neil feels a comfort within them that he hasn’t felt in years. Like sinking into Andrew’s arms after a long day or propping his socked feet in Aaron’s lap as they queue up a movie. 

They don’t feel the same as they used to, but that’s okay. That’s to be expected. When he’d told Aaron about Jean’s sudden request to meet they had talked to him about that possibility. The possibility that he and Jean may have just drifted too far for too long, and that they might talk for hours and decide not to reconnect after all, and that that’s just how life works sometimes.

Neil had been nervous to talk to Aaron about Jean. In the early stages of their friendship, Neil had pretty much  _only_ talked about Jean, and Aaron had fought long and hard to get that space in Neil’s head and claim it as his own. Aaron also is just generally not the best at sharing best friends, as demonstrated by the entire Andrew debacle. 

Aside from Andrew, Aaron isn’t particularly fond of Jean either, which amuses Neil to no end. Aaron’s the type to ignore the possibility of two-sided fault, so he blames Jean entirely for not trying harder to keep in touch, despite Neil’s assurances that it was just as much his own fault as it was Jean’s. Stubborn. All of them. 

Neil takes a seat in front of Jean just as Allison comes over with their drinks. She places glasses of ice water in front of them both, and a lemon hugs the edge of Neil’s glass. Neil nods at her, and she nods back, surprisingly not saying a word as she heads back to the kitchen. Neil tilts his head in confusion, but is brought out of his thoughts again when he hears Jean’s voice say “I would have gotten you the lemonade, but the one they make here is far too sweet for you to handle.”

Neil plucks the lemon off the edge of his glass and squeezes it into his water. “Yeah,” he allows, relishing in the fact that this, at least, Jean remembers. “You’ve eaten here?”

As soon as he says it, he realizes how dumb of a question it was to ask. Jean’s mouth quirks up a little. “Yeah,” he says “Kevin works here and David owns it.”

“Right,” Neil says.  _I work here_ he wants to say, but he bites his own tongue meanly. Jean knows Kevin better than he’ll ever know Neil now, and that’s okay. Wymack is basically like a father to Jean in the way he nearly was for Neil, and that’s okay. That’s how life works. Still though, he can’t help but add in the smallest hint of a jab. “Have you memorized my schedule?”

Jean tilts his head slightly to the side. “What?”

Neil takes a sip of his water. “So you would be able to avoid me anytime you came here,” he says, bitterness seeping into his tone. “Surely you’d have to memorize my work schedule. Or maybe Kevin has it pinned on the fridge at your place.”

Jean’s jaw works, and Neil feels a little more anger rise to the surface. He been pushing down these feelings for so long. He’d been so alone, for so long, and it feels like he’s suddenly allowing himself to feel the hurt from that in full force now that Jean is in front of him again. “Neil,” Jean says lowly, and his voice rings with a warning.

“No, Jean,” Neil huffs out, having gone from having nothing to say to having far too much. “Listen. Why has this taken you so long? Why did you just drop this on me after months of nothing?”

Neil can see Jean’s own temper jumping now, well hidden but so very clearly there, eyebrows drawn and and jaw shut tight, shoulders tensed. “ _I_ was the one calling  _you,_ ” he says bitterly.

“After a literal  _year_ of me asking to meet up again—” Neil quiets when Allison comes back to take their orders, rattling off his usual without meeting her eyes.

She walks away again, and Neil huffs quietly. “Sorry,” he says “I guess I didn’t realize how angry I was about that.”

Jean looks like he’s trying to find a middle ground between pissed and supportive, and his face is sour when he says “Okay.”

Jean’s hands are splayed across the table, boney knuckles facing up and slashing scars curving up from the insides of his wrists. Neil shivers at the sight of them peeking out so easily from Jean’s sweater, remembering harder times in high school and late phone calls and soaked bandages.

It’s so much harder to think about Andrew’s own scars when he had witnessed what it had been like for Jean first-hand.

“Okay?” Neil prompts after a solid few minutes “ _I_ said sorry.”

Jean’s shoulders drop. “Neil,” he says “you know I’m bad at this. I put this shit off for so long because I was afraid you’d be angry. Kevin and Jeremy finally convinced me to give it a chance and I  _did_ and now,” he gestures at Neil vaguely. “I was right. You still can’t control your goddamn mouth.”

Neil feels his anger peaking, and he almost wishes Aaron or Andrew were here to pull him back from this one. “And you still haven’t grown a goddamn spine? How surprising.”

Jean drums his elegant fingers over the top of the table, and they play invisible keys. Jean’s hands feel out of place here in the midst of their argument somehow. Like they’re meant to be back in time when they were kids and Jean was playing him music with an ease Neil could never comprehend. “You’re one to talk,” Jean fires back. “You still go for runs instead of dealing with your problems?”

Neil scoffs.  _Yes, but shut up_ . “I should have listened to Aaron,” he mutters, and Jean’s eyes snap up. 

“Oh yes,” Jean huffs, “Kevin told me you’ve befriended the Minyards as well. I’m forever disappointed with who you two choose for friends.”

“Aaron is a better friend than  _you’ve_ been recently,” Neil shoots back, trying to ignore the way his spine tingles uncomfortably from implications at the end of Jean’s declaration.

“What’s so good about him, then?” Jean prompts icily. “You would have said the same thing about Riko back then.”

It’s been a long time since Neil’s let himself get angry enough that he considers violence. Self protection is one thing, but fighting out of anger he’d thought he would never do. Right now, though, Neil fantasizes for a solid minute about how good it would feel to punch Jean in the mouth and hopefully knock some fucking sense into him. 

He doesn’t, though, because he doesn’t actually want to hurt Jean. Instead, he stands from his chair and takes a step to the side so he’s next to the table itself. Jean watches on warily, and his dark eyes are fiery with temper still, but he doesn’t say a word when Neil makes to leave. Neil scoffs.

“ _That’s_ the difference between you and Aaron,” hisses Neil. “Aaron would  _never_ let me leave like this. Aaron would have never let me leave in the first place.”

“Sure,” Jean scoffs, the most emotion he’s shown in his voice throughout this entire conversation. “If that’s such a big difference then what’s the difference between him and Riko? Hanging onto you for dear life and threatening people who get in his way? Real familiar. What about you? Begging to meet me for months and the moment I say I’m ready you start accusing me? What’s the difference between  _you_ and Riko?”

Neil’s breath stutters to a stop, and he has to fight for every gasp of air his lungs attempt. His vision goes dark around the edges and his fingers go a little numb. In front of him, Jean watches him carefully across the table, anger and something like guilt fresh in his dark eyes. “Neil,” he starts, looking down at his hands and back up just as quickly. “Neil,” he stutters “you know I don’t—I didn’t—”

He’s cut off as Allison returns with their food, and the sight of the always-delicious baked mac and cheese nearly makes him vomit. He pushes himself out of his haze hastily, brushing past Allison and shoving his way through the front doors. His and Jean’s argument had been quiet and isolated enough that nobody in the resteraunt had overheard, but Neil’s sudden departure was sure to catch attention.

Neil pats his pockets for the car keys and finds them empty. He must have put them in his employee cubby at the back of the restaurant out of habit. His coat has also disappeared and the frozen wind bites into his skin ruthlessly despite the heavy sunlight. He huffs breaths out through his nose and barely glances back at the parking lot before he takes off running. His jeans chafe against the skin of his thighs, and his cheeks sting from the bitter cold, but he doesn’t stop. 

He runs, and he runs, and he doesn’t think for even a moment, passing his and Aaron’s apartment and making a lazy path to the nearest park in his mind. It’s nearly three miles out, but he gets there in less than 20 minutes, runs four laps around the walking trail, and makes his way back to the apartment just before sundown. 

When he gets there, he pours himself and drinks 4 consecutive glasses of water, washes his hands in the bathroom sink, and stares at himself in the mirror until his faded scars blur into silvery whorls and his skin becomes a kaleidoscope of sallow yellows and shadowy dark pigments.

His phone buzzes in the pocket of his sweatshirt, and he fishes it out unseeingly, trying to purge the sight of his own face from where it’s imprinted on the insides of his eyelids. 

On the screen is a text from Aaron, but he presses the  _call_ button before he can even read it, breathing out his best friend’s name as soon as he hears the call connect.

“Neil,” Aaron replies, concern evident in his voice. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Neil breathes, his mind finally beginning to calm at the sound of Aaron’s familiar voice, both so similar and so different to Andrew’s. “Yeah, I’m fine. Meeting with Jean didn’t go well, is all.”

“Oh,” Aaron sighs “okay. Glad you’re okay.” A pause. “Do you need anything?”

Neil sighs, putting his phone on speaker and leaning forward to rest his forehead on the cool glass of the mirror. “Just come home soon,” he says. Aaron and Katelyn had taken a day-long hiking trip a few hours out, meaning Aaron most likely won’t be home until well past midnight, but Neil still asks.

“Okay,” Aaron says easily. “We’re packing the car back up now. I guess I’ll just have to get Kate to break the laws of the road.”

“What?” Katelyn’s voice calls out faintly from across the line, and Neil feels his cheeks tug up in a smile despite everything. 

“Thank you,” Neil says, and he hangs up, setting his phone back on the edge of the sink, stopping suddenly when he sees the many messages waiting there for him.

**Andrew: how did it go?**

**Andrew: …did you die?**

**Andrew: neil**

**Andrew: if you died in a ditch with my car I will be so pissed neil**

**Andrew: call me**

Neil breathes out a gentle huff of air and sits on the closed toilet seat to text Andrew back. 

**Neil: Not dead. Jean and I had an argument and I went for a run. Car is still at Palmetto’s the keys are in my cubby.**

Not ten seconds later, another text whooshes through. 

**Andrew: okay**

**Andrew: do you need anything?**

Despite everything, Neil smiles at the parallel between Andrew and Aaron’s words.

**Neil: Come see me?**

**Andrew: okay**

Neil stands on creaking knees and sore thighs and makes his way back into the kitchen. He’s yet to eat today, and his body protests that fact, so he sets about making himself a package of ramen. Andrew’s sure to throw a fit about it, but Neil can’t be bothered to put in any more effort than that right now.

Just as he’s settling on the couch with his bowl and a discovery channel documentary, the door the the apartment swings open to reveal Andrew. He’s a shadowed figure with the hallway lights behind him, but when he closes the door he goes straight to Neil.

Neil’s legs are tucked up to his chest as his sips the broth one spoonful at a time, and Andrew doesn’t say anything when he plops himself on the opposite side of the couch. They sit in silence as Neil eats, and Andrew switches the channel to an inane Christmas movie with no plot that neither of them pay attention to. 

By the time Neil is done with his ramen, his legs ache from being in the same position for too long after such a taxing run, and he slides down the couch until he’s flat on his back and his legs are completely in Andrew’s lap. Andrew raises an eyebrow, but Neil just shifts further down, letting his eyes close and his head lean back on the arm of the couch. Andrew gets up, and Neil glares at him discontentedly, but Andrew just waves him off, heading in the direction of Neil’s room.

Neil lets it go, getting comfortable again as he listens to Andrew rummage through his drawers. When he returns Neil cracks his eyes open to find him holding a quilt and a pair of Neil’s running shorts. Neil nods in confirmation, too lazy to do much more than lift his hips a little as Andrew shimmies his legs out of his stiff jeans and into the soft shorts. 

Andrew covers Neil with the quilt and snakes his hands under until he’s navigated to Neil’s bare legs. He kneads the sore muscles gently, and Neil lets himself relax for the first time since the morning.

Neil feels himself sinking further into the couch with every push and pull of Andrew’s capable hands, and Neil wonders absentmindedly if Andrew would ever consider playing piano. 

As if on queue, the opening scenes to  _Howl’s Moving Castle_ flash across the TV screen, and Neil fights back his shiver as the notes of the all-too-familiar song ring through the room. 

Eventually, Andrew stops his ministrations, and Neil takes that as his queue to change positions. He sits up on the couch and flips himself entirely until his head is on Andrew’s shoulder and Andrew’s arms are holding him tightly. 

Anxiety still sings under his skin, and he’s going to need to revisit the Jean debacle sooner rather than later, but for now, Neil lets his mind go blank. 

Neil zones out for most of the movie, letting the familiar scenes wash over him like warm water. It isn’t until several hours later that the moment is ruined by the sound of Aaron’s keys jingling in the door.

Suddenly, Neil is wide awake. He pushes himself away from Andrew, but it’s far too late, and Aaron comes crashing through the door before they can even untangle their limbs completely.

Neil watches the exact moment Aaron realizes what he’d just walked in on. He stops in his tracks, his eyes bouncing between Neil and Andrew a few times before ultimately landing on Andrew. “Get out,” he demands, his voice shaking. 

Andrew makes no move to do so, and Aaron looks like he’s about ready to start shouting, so Neil pipes up for the first time in hours to plead “Just do it, Andrew.”

This conversation is a long time coming, and Andrew being here would only make everything harder. Still though, Neil watches Andrew disentangle himself somewhat mournfully, pressing his fingertips to his temple to ward off the headache that’s been building there all day.

“Neil!” Aaron exclaims, making it about ten times worse.

Neil looks up into Aaron’s angry, betrayed, over-dramatic face, hoping that his friend will at least give him until morning to explain everything. “You’re angry,” Neil observes un helpfully, kicking himself as soon as the words leave his mouth.

“I wouldn’t have been if you had just  _told_ me!” Aaron exclaims, gesturing wildly.

Neil feels his previous guilt slide off his back languidly, a deep fire of temper rising up in his stomach in its place. He’s pissed, and he’s not in the mood to deal with this. He’s pissed at Aaron for throwing that stupid half-thought of a promise at Neil when he hadn’t understood what it meant. He’s still pissed at Jean for being a dick. He’s pissed at himself for letting this secret get this far. He’s pissed at Andrew for allowing this to happen at all. “Yes,” Neil manages to grit out, “You would have.” He’s not angry at Aaron, not really, but he’s never been the type to let himself be lied to. “You always do this,” he continues. “I  _knew_ you would do this.”

Aaron leans against the kitchen counter with his arms in front of his chest, his hands wringing together. “What?” he asks, “I always do what?”

Neil glares. “You  _know_ what I’m talking about. I’m not saying this is your fault, but it’s definitely not all mine, either.”

“You promised—” Aaron starts, but Neil cuts him off. 

“You don’t give a shit about promises, Aaron,” he says, trying to keep his voice even. “I  _know_ you. And if you did care about them you would have kept yours to Andrew.”

“Oh, and now we’re talking about him again,” Aaron hisses. “You never used to mention him before—oh wait.”

“I would’ve told you the minute I started feeling  _anything_ if you hadn’t  _forbade_ me against it like I’m a child or something!”

“You promised,” Aaron repeats as he slumps back against the counter. “I’m pissed off,” he says.

Neil can see that—Aaron carries his anger differently than Neil. Where Neil’s anger builds and explodes, Aaron’s comes out in bursts and leaves just as quickly, leaving him a grumpy shell for 5 to 7 business days. He’s still mad, but he’s in no state to fight anymore. The best thing for Neil to do is probably to apologize again, ask Aaron to think about it and try to get over it. Still though, it’s late, and Neil’s just had quite possibly the worst day ever, and he really doesn’t want to deal with this right now. He turns his back to the kitchen and swoops his backpack off the arm of the couch. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he tells Aaron, who doesn’t even look up at him, and then he closes the door behind him.

Neil leaves, and for the first time ever, Aaron lets him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has been called “chapter eight - neil is sad and everything sucks real bad” in my doc since the first day i of outlining lmao
> 
> I listened to the Howl’s moving castle intro all throughout writing this chapter and I accidentally made Jean really mean. Lmao I’m sorryyyy but remember you are seeing this from Neil’s perspective only! Hope you enjoyed the chapter! Things are coming to a close sooner rather than later...
> 
> Comments make me happppppyyyyyy :]


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nearly there now :,)

Chapter 9

“Neil?” Seth asks, his voice groggy and sleep-stilted. Neil clutches his phone tighter in his fist, willing his shaking pulse to calm down. He’s back outside, his skin shimmering with goosebumps and lips dry and pebbling, coat long forgotten.

He’s not sure why his thumb had pressed Seth’s name when he’d tugged his phone out of his pocket as opposed to Andrew or Matt’s, but he isn’t about to turn back now. Andrew was probably worried enough already, and Matt had an early shift at Palmetto’s in the morning. Plus, Seth was one of the few who actually knew about the true nature of Neil and Andrew’s relationship, at least as far as Neil knew.

“Hi,” Neil responds, trying to keep his tone flat even as he shivers from adrenaline and the cold air. “Can I crash at your place tonight?”

Neil hears rustling on the other end of the line. “Yeah man,” Seth responds easily “You at your place?”

The wind wheezes harsher against the skin of Neil’s face and neck. “Yeah,” he breathes out.

“Okay,” Seth says. “Give me ten. Did you want to stay on the line?”

Neil flexes his numb fingers in front of his face, watching idly as the skin on a few knuckles crack deeper with the dry cold. “No, that’s okay” he tells Seth.

Seth hums. “Okay,” he says “See you in a few. You should go back inside until then, though. I’ll text.”

Neil nods even though he knows Seth can’t see it, says “Thank you,” and then hangs up. He clutches the phone to his chest, its freezing screen pressed to the thin skin of his forearm and sending cold chills to shock their way up his veins. 

He doesn’t go inside, but he does retreat back under the small canopy outside the apartment building, the wind whistling as it rebounds against the structure. He feels the world move around him as he stands motionless, his phone buzzing with a few texts from Andrew that he ignores for now.

He feels like a coward. He feels betrayed. Disappointed, angry, sad; he doesn’t know. He feels the weight of his decisions pressing down on his shoulders like oversized paperweights. He feels his mind swirling away from him the longer he tries to think about it.

His conversation with Jean had been a complete disaster, but Neil could have predicted that. He’s mostly calmed down from that by now, what with Andrew’s company and the crutches of time on his side. The wound is still fresh, though. The way he’s pretty sure he’s just lost one of his best friends for good and that Aaron will probably never trust him again.

Seth’s low to the ground, run-down car pulls up to the canopy. Neil can see the outline of Seth through the passenger’s side window, and he climbs in without a word.

Seth shakes his head when he sees Neil shivering but doesn’t say anything. The inside of the car is shielded from the harsh whipping of the wind, but the heat doesn’t work. Neil tucks his arms into the short sleeves of his t-shirt and listens to the monotonous drone of the radio for the entirety of the ride.

Neil follows Seth up the rickety stairs to his apartment. He has a roommate, but he’s apparently not around much, so it’s almost like Seth lives alone. He gives Neil a quick tour, showing him the couch and the kitchen and the bathroom, insists that Neil make himself at home and call for him if he needs anything, and disappears to his room. 

Neil appreciates it; that assurance that Seth won’t push for answers—at least not until the morning. Neil doesn’t think he could talk about today again if he tried, and his eyelids are drooping even as he sends Andrew a quick text to let him know he’s alive. He sinks into the couch cushions and tugs a quilt over himself, trying to coax some warmth back into his skin, drifting off to sleep in mere seconds.

~

The air is still and warm when Neil wakes up, quilt still tucked under his chin and back stiff against the line of the couch backing. He stretches as he yawns, allowing his bones to pop and crackle in much-needed relief. Sun streaks through the windows of Seth’s apartment, slashing lines across Neil’s eyelids and causing him to hide his face away as he opens his eyes. 

Neil lays still for a few moments longer before grabbing his phone, flicking it on and checking the time. It’s not even 8am yet, which is disappointing, but he already has an array of messages waiting for him from Andrew, taking place just after Neil had texted him and let him know he’s safe and crashing at Seth’s.

**Andrew: how did it go?**

**Andrew: dumb question**

**Andrew: aaron just called me, told me i’m an asshole, and then hung up**

**Andrew: i’m going to have to talk to my brother, aren’t i?**

**Andrew: i hate you**

Neil sighs, sitting up slightly on the couch and typing back a quick reply.

**Neil: I can handle it**

**Neil: This isn’t your mess to deal with**

Andrew replies near-instantly, something Neil always appreciates.

**Andrew: shut up**

**Andrew: i’ll talk to him after work today**

**Andrew: you have the day off. if you show your face here in the next 24 hours i’m never sucking your dick again**

**Neil: Bold words**

**Neil: I’ll take the day off**

**Neil: Thank you**

Andrew sends him a simple knife emoji in reply, so Neil sets his phone on the coffee table and gets up to make himself and Seth a pot of coffee. 

By the time Neil’s set the pot to brew, Seth is stumbling out of his bedroom in search of the coffee. Neil gives him a small wave as he leans against the small kitchen counter, and Seth returns the gesture lazily, brushing past Neil to get to the bathroom.

Neil pours two mugfuls of coffee as soon as the machine beeps, leaving one on the counter for Seth to do what he wants with and taking the other back to the couch.

Neil hears the clink of silverware in the kitchen a few moments later, and Seth appears next to him on the couch shortly after, mug in hand and feet kicked up on the small coffee table. “So,” he says haltingly, taking a sip of his drink “what the hell happened last night?”

Neil lets the hot steam from his cup rise into his face, brushing his top lip against the scalding liquid for a moment as he thinks of a response. “I was having a bad day,” he starts. “Aaron found out about me and Andrew and made things worse. I just needed to get away form it all.”

Seth hums, taking another sip of coffee and not looking phased in the slightest that it must be scalding hot. “Well,” he says, “I don’t think Aaron has it in him to stay mad at you, if that makes you feel better.”

It does, but Neil isn’t convinced it’s that easy. “I know,” he allows “but he _definitely_ has it in him to stay mad at Andrew.”

Seth shrugs. “They can figure that out themselves, can they not?”

Neil supposes that’s true, especially with Andrew making an effort to fix things sooner rather than later. “Yeah…” Neil trails off, uncertain.

“Look, Josten,” Seth begins, setting his mug on the coffee table and turning to face Neil completely. “I’ve been in my fair share of situations like this. There’s no real way to go about fixing them, but I’ve found that it can be beneficial to start from the ground up. Make a list of things you need to fix, break them down, and do what needs to be done. There’s no beating around the bush with this shit, and I’m sure you know that.”

Neil keeps his head down, eyes staring vacantly into his half-full coffee mug. Seth, for all his brashness and dumb decisions, seems to know what he’s talking about. Neil has two problems; Jean and Aaron. One of them is considerably more pressing than the other, but is also much harder to deal with, so he starts small.

Jean had asked Neil to meet up after over a year of posturing, only for Neil to shoot him down almost immediately. Neil stands by most everything he’d said yesterday, but he supposes he does regret not giving Jean a better chance to explain. He’d let his anger get the best of him, and he’d done the same thing later that night with Aaron. No matter how much the two of them had deserved it, Neil hates how easy it had been to let himself go so thoroughly.

Neil thinks about his options. He could go about his day, check up with Andrew, and talk to Aaron about everything after he and Andrew had—hopefully—made amends. He could ignore Jean completely and finally let his oldest friend slip through the cracks of his fingers. He could go after Jean and demand an explanation, or he could go after him and apologize himself. He could hide away at Seth’s place for another night and deal with the consequences of his actions later.

He glances over at Seth, who has now pulled out his phone and is playing an intense-looking game of _Candy Crush_. Neil sighs quietly to himself, pulls out his phone, and sends Kevin a text message.

~

Neil knocks on the door to Kevin and Jean’s shared apartment loudly, not stopping until it swings open to reveal a very disgruntled Jean in the doorway. Neil blinks at him, almost confused at the sight of him so casual, before he remembers that Kevin is a bitch and absolutely didn’t tell Jean about Neil asking for his address. Oh well.

Jean wears a sweatshirt and a pair of flannel pajama pants, his dark hair messy and greasy against his forehead and drooping into his eyes uncooperatively. He’s got one hand on the doorknob and the other hovering uncertainly in the air between them. His dark eyes are wide and sleep-filled. “Neil?” Jean asks, voice croaky.

“Hi,” Neil responds, shuffling his feet back and forth a little on the doormat, scuffing the toe of his sneaker against the rough material.

Jean stares at him for a moment longer, tired eyes sharpening as they bore into Neil. Wordlessly, he steps aside, gesturing for Neil to follow through the open doorway.

He does, making his way inside the apartment and taking in his surroundings silently. There’s two closed bedroom doors, one bathroom at the end of the hallway, a congregation of dry-erase markers magnetized to the refrigerator, and absolutely zero clutter. It’s everything Neil could have ever expected from Kevin and Jean together in one place for an extended amount of time. There’s a baby grand piano tucked safely into the corner.

Neil’s eyes linger on the instrument shining pristinely against the sunlight. He wonders if Jean still plays as often as he used to.

Jean sits on the arm of the couch, hands in his lap. Neil clears his throat, gesturing to the piano “Do you still play?”

Jean stares at him, no doubt trying to work out Neil’s motivations. He stands wordlessly, making his way to the piano and trailing his fingers along the keys. “Sometimes,” he says quietly. “Less, lately.”

Neil nods, sitting at the piano bench and tapping his foot idly against the tuning pedals. Silence stretches out before them, and Neil longs for the days when things were less complicated, even if they didn’t seem so.

But Neil can’t change that—all he can do is try to fix the things he’d fucked up.

Neil clears his throat, tracing gentle fingertips over the ivory keys. “Um,” he says, sucking his bottom lip between his teeth and dragging his tongue against the peeling skin he finds there. “I’m… sorry. For pushing you so hard yesterday. I didn’t mean to be angry with you… it just sort of happened.”

Jean sighs again and drops himself onto the bench next to Neil. His hands wring themselves tirelessly in his own lap, stretching the fabric of his sleep pants. “I’m sorry it took me so long to agree to meet up,” Jean says “I was… apprehensive. And I still said a lot of things I didn’t mean.” He meets Neil’s eyes for the first time “I’m sorry. I never should have compared you to him—you’re nothing like him, I was just trying to get a deep hit in.”

Neil knows, but the reminder of Jean’s harsh words still make him feel like cringing. “Yeah,” he allows “it worked.”

Jean winces, reaching a slender hand out to rest alongside the keys like a peace offering. “I’m sorry,” Jean says again, and Neil nods in acceptance.

Neil presses his pointer finger deeper into a key and a loud, ringing note sings through the apartment. He does it again, and again, until Jean pipes up enough to ask “Did I ever try to teach you how to play?”

Neil shakes his head in silence. “I never wanted to learn,” he says, and it’s the truth. He’s never been interested in playing the piano himself when it has always been the presence of Jean behind the keys that brings him comfort.

Jean splays his fingers along the keys widely, pressing gently enough for light clicking sounds to emit but not for the notes to play out fully. “I haven’t played the song since you left for England,” Jean admits, his voice quiet. “Not a single time.”

Neil hums, feeling strangely pleased by this fact. “Do you still remember it?”

Jean shrugs, testing out a few keys before seeming to allow muscle memory to take over, stumbling across the first few notes and then falling near-seamlessly into the song. The notes swirl around them, and Neil watches Jean’s hands fly across the keys in wonder, the song echoing off the walls loudly and no doubt drifting through to other apartments. Neil wonders if the neighbors enjoy hearing Jean play as much as he does.

They have a lot to talk about. Neil wants Jean to tell him about the Jeremy person he keeps mentioning, and Neil needs to talk to Jean more in depth about the twins. But for now, with the notes to _Howl’s Moving Castle_ flying through the air just like they used to, and Jean settled beside him on a piano bench so comfortably, Neil doesn’t feel the need to talk yet.

Neil sits on his hands and listens.

~

Neil stays at Jean’s for the rest of the day, ordering Chinese food and talking on the couch for hours. They talk about Jeremy—a man Jean has been trying to woo for months now—and they talk about Aaron—Jean gives him very bad advice—and it’s good. It’s good to be in the presence of his friend after so long and to talk like nothing had ever happened. It’s good to talk about their falling out, too. To talk about where they went wrong and what they can do in the future. They talk about Kevin and tell embarrassing stories about him, and Neil tells Jean about how he and Andrew had gotten together, enjoying the way Jean’s nose always crinkles up at the mention of him.

Their relationship isn’t magically fixed, but it feels like they’ve finally taken that first step. Neil is probably going to be pissed at Jean for the next few weeks about the comments he’d made at their lunch meeting, and Jean is still going to be hesitant to make new plans. They’re going to forget to talk again at some point, and maybe they’ll have to go through all of this again—but Neil doesn’t think so.

The plans they stretch out before them are hopeful and achievable, and Neil is excited to make this work. He wants to meet Jeremy and tease Jean about being a hopeless romantic. He wants to make fun of Kevin with Jean by his side again. He wants to force Jean, Andrew, and Aaron into a padded room together and make them talk to each other. He wants to walk away from the dumpster fire of their childhoods together, and he doesn’t ever want to look back again.

Eventually, he has to go home. Jean gives Neil a ride back to his and Aaron’s complex, and Neil stands outside the door long after Jean pulls away. He’d texted Andrew beforehand and asked him how his talk with Aaron had gone and received nothing but a thumbs up emoji in return, which would be less ominous if it had been sent by anyone other than Andrew.

Neil takes a deep breath and pushes the door to the complex open, not daring to slow his footfalls as he makes his way up the stairs and towards the apartment.

He takes his key into his hand, turns it in the lock, and pushes the door open. He’s still wearing the same clothes he’d worn out yesterday, and he desperately needs a shower, but he stops short when he spots Aaron on the couch. His knees are pulled up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them protectively. He looks worn out and tired, but his eyes are awake and ready when they meet Neil’s.

“Hey,” Neil says, trying for casual and landing somewhere halfway between anxious and guilty.

Aaron tightens his arms around himself. “Hi,” he responds.

Neil sits on the arm of the couch, rubbing his palms against his goosebump-covered arms. “Um,” he starts “did you talk to Andrew?”

Aaron looks up briefly before dropping his gaze back to his lap. “Yeah,” he says. “We talked about it.”

Neil quirks an eyebrow. He doesn’t know how to apologize for something like this. It was easy enough to say sorry to Jean, but Aaron has always been different. It’s difficult to know where to begin with him.

“Okay,” Neil says “Did that go okay?”

Aaron nods “Yeah,” he says again.

Silence stretches before them, and Neil knows he needs to be the one to break it. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” he says. “I wanted to.”

“I know,” Aaron says quietly. “It was my fault too.”

It’s not really an apology yet, but Neil doesn’t need one right now. He sinks from the armrest to the couch cushions and tugs a blanket up over his legs. Aaron switches the TV to National Geographic.

Neil rests his head on his best friend’s shoulder. It’s enough for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhh hello! Hopefully you enjoyed this short healing chapter—I’ve never written anything like this so my apologies if it felt rushed! Next Wednesday chefdrew ends :,)
> 
> Comments make me happy if you’d like to share your thoughts! :)


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the heinous shortage of Andrew content in the last few chapters lolol. Chefdrew is back in full force now :]
> 
> This is the last of it guys :,) i hope you have enjoyed this little journey as much as i have <3

Chapter 10

Neil swerves through the open doorway of Palmetto’s back entrance, eyes scanning the area almost instinctually for Andrew. 

The kitchen is surprisingly crowded, Palmetto employees having made their way in from the main room to try and sneak bites of food Andrew and the others are preparing. Apparently, the New Year’s Eve party is something the restaurant puts together every year. Neil had only found out about it about 30 minutes ago, though, since everyone he works with seems to routinely forget that he has only been working at Palmetto’s for about six months. He’d been watching a movie with Aaron and Katelyn on the living room couch when he’d received a series of bombarding texts from the group chat about his absence. Aaron had laughed openly at him as he rushed to get ready and Seth had had to come pick him up since Andrew was busy cooking dinner for everyone.

Allison flits around the counters in a flowing green dress, pulling Renee along by the hand and nearly knocking Roland flat on his ass. Seth huffs out of his jacket by the doorway and makes his way over to the office door to talk to Wymack and Dan, who are passing a rambunctious Matt between them like a racquet ball. Erik is chopping vegetables at a bruising pace even while Nicky clings to his left elbow, and Kevin lurks over the shoulder of the man Neil had been searching for, glaring at the back of Andrew’s head while Andrew whisks something in a bowl.

Neil makes his way through the small crowd, propping his hip against the counter beside where Andrew works. Andrew glances up at him and offers Neil a fond nod without stopping his whisking. Neil smiles back at him before turning his attention to Kevin. “What are you all upset about?”

Kevin huffs, still peering over Andrew’s shoulder and letting out a distressed noise when he dumps a few tablespoons of sugar into his bowl. “He’s adding way too much sugar to the icing,” he complains, causing Neil to let out an amused chuckle. Andrew pointedly adds another spoonful. “He’s going to ruin it,” Kevin whines.

Andrew shrugs. “It’s not like you’re going to be eating it anyways, Day,” he says, setting aside the bowl of icing and scooping a spoonful of the fluffy mixture into his mouth. 

Since he’s just cooking for the employees, Andrew isn’t wearing his hairnet, allowing his floppy blonde hair to sink forward into his eyes as he gets back to work on something new. Neil pushes the hair back gently, smiling at the way Andrew leans almost subconsciously back into his touch. “Yeah, Kevin,” Neil says distractedly, poking his pointer finger into Andrew’s cheek to prompt the appearance of a dimple. “If you don’t like it, don’t eat it.”

“Get fucked,” Andrew adds without looking up.

Kevin shakes his head good naturedly. “You’d agree with me if you weren’t so whipped, Josten,” he accuses, moving to Neil’s other side to help Erik with the vegetables.

Neil shrugs “Yeah,” he admits, watching the way Andrew’s eyebrow twitches. He traces it with his fingertip, and Andrew glances up at him from under his lashes, narrowing his eyes.

“You want something,” Andrew observes, pouring a steaming mixture from one pot to another.

“No,” Neil says, “I just like you, that’s all.”

Andrew rolls his eyes, a faint blush rising to his cheeks. “Shut your goddamn mouth,” he says fondly.

“Maybe later,” Neil allows. “Will I be coming home with you tonight?”

Andrew glances over at Renee, who’s migrated to the corner of the kitchen and is talking quietly with Allison. “Yeah,” he says simply.

Neil leans more of his weight against the counter, and Andrew pats the countertop pointedly in the same way he always pats the couch for the cats. Neil huffs, pushing himself onto the counter where there’s a few feet of empty space. It feels strange to be sitting there, since he’s obviously never been allowed to do so during restaurant hours, but Wymack just rolls his eyes when Neil catches his eye, nodding along to whatever Dan is telling him.

Andrew pulls multiple dishes out of the oven without any timers going off to remind him, and Neil is once again struck by the depth of his talents in the kitchen. His memory, his hand-eye coordination, and his overall good-at-everything air makes him one of the best chefs out there, Neil is sure. Maybe he should sign Andrew up for a cooking show or something.

Andrew returns to there little station, stirring something that’s boiling in a pot with one hand and using the other to hold Neil’s calve firmly. Neil sighs contentedly, leaning his shoulders back against the wall and letting the chatter of his friends and the warmth of the kitchen paired with Andrew’s touch relax his mind.

Eventually, the dinner is mostly ready and the deserts are cooling on the countertops, and Neil is bullied to the table along with everyone else. His stomach growls insistently at the sight and smell of Andrew’s cooking, and chatter quickly dissipates as everyone digs into their meals.

It reminds Neil of what Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner always looks like on TV shows, but it feels different here. With the orange-yellow fairy lights lit and all of them crowded around the table eating bistro food it feels full and authentic in a way those shows never do. In the same way it feels full when he and Aaron did their own little Thanksgiving this year, or when Aaron came back from Nicky’s house on Christmas day with Andrew in tow and a small pile of gifts for him.

At his side, Andrew grabs his hand under the table, and Neil leans against his shoulder meeting his friends’ knowing eyes across the table one by one.

They all laze around for a while after dinner, pulling the Times Square ball drop thing up on all the TVs. Seth, Roland, and Renee make drinks behind the bar and all the others help the chefs clean up the kitchen, and by the time they’re all out in the main room again it’s less than five minutes to the new year.

Neil’s sitting between Matt and Andrew at the bar, a non-alcoholic Shirley Temple in front of him curtesy of Renee. Neil asks Andrew for a kiss with ten seconds left and receives a peck on the mouth for his troubles. Neil pouts a little about it, but doesn’t complain, knowing that he’ll have plenty of time to kiss Andrew later.

They all say their goodbyes shortly after, and Andrew drives them to his and Renee’s place in comfortable silence. It almost reminds Neil of those secret drives to the drive-in theater all those months ago, when Neil had been uncertain but ready to try and Andrew had been convinced it wouldn’t work out.

Neil remembers kissing Andrew in the backseat of this car for the first time, the flashes from the movie screen playing across his surprised face and shining hair. Neil almost wishes the drive-in was open so they could recreate that moment, but then Andrew glances over at him and traces his fingertips over Neil’s left knee and suddenly he’s fully present again.

Neil shifts himself closer to the driver’s side, and Andrew idly trails his fingers up the inseam of Neil’s jeans, pausing just before anything of substance can come from that. Neil grins, almost racing out of the car when Andrew finally parks it outside of his complex. Andrew watches him with amusement, following him up to the apartment leisurely.

Neil spins around as soon as he hears the door close behind them, but Andrew’s already herding him towards the bathroom. “Brush your teeth and shower,” he tells Neil.

Neil grins, affecting a hurt expression even as he shucks out of his jeans. “Are you saying I smell?”

“Yes,” Andrew responds easily, removing his own shirt.

Neil brushes his teeth while Andrew does the same, feeling light and happy and domestic and sappy. He doesn’t know when things had gotten so good or what he’d done to deserve it, but he isn’t about to complain. He has Andrew and Aaron both once again, and they aren’t at each other’s throats. He has Jean over the phone and sometimes in person for lunches and piano lessons. He has all his friends at Palmetto’s and a job that has given him more than he could have ever imagined.

He rinses the toothpaste out of his mouth and meets Andrew’s eyes in the mirror, watching as Andrew rolls his eyes. “You’re being sappy,” he accuses, pushing Neil towards the shower not unkindly.

Neil allows it, stepping under the hot water. “Yeah,” he admits, “I just really like you.”

Andrew huffs, coming up behind Neil and claiming some of the warmth for himself. “You said that once already tonight, dumbass.”

Neil turns to see Andrew, his blonde hair darkened and plastered to his forehead by the water and his arms and shoulders peppered with goosebumps. Neil leans forward to rest his head on Andrew’s shoulder. “It’s the truth,” he says quietly.

Andrew brushes a soapy hand up Neil’s spine, running it through his tangled hair. “You’re a mess and I hate you,” Andrew says. “I can’t believe I’m about to sleep with you.”

Neil leans up into the hands that are now conditioning his hair. “You are, are you now?”

“Mhm,” Andrew hums, moving Neil’s head directly under the spray of water and then moving on to wash himself. “It’s embarrassing, really.”

Neil drags his palm up Andrew’s ribs, scratching lightly with his nails as he goes. “I bet,” he agrees sarcastically. “You’ll have to make sure to keep that under wraps.”

Andrew shuts off the water, stepping out of the shower and lazily drying himself as he walks out of the bathroom. Neil follows suit, flopping back-first onto Andrew’s bed as soon as he can, not bothering to put a towel under his dripping hair. Andrew leans over him, dragging a kiss down Neil’s jaw. “Nah,” he says quietly against the skin there. “I’m done with keeping you a secret.”

Andrew plants a heavy kiss on Neil’s mouth. “Technically,” Neil huffs out between breaths, kissing back just as hard “ _I_ was keeping _you_ a secret.”

Andrew hums but doesn’t respond, too busy kissing his way down Neil’s neck. Neil arches up into it, locking his calves over Andrew’s and pulling him closer that way. Neil drags his hands over Andrew’s back, keeping his hands above his waistline just in case.

Neil lets himself be kissed into the mattress, feelings bubbling up inside his chest in the intense way they always do when he kisses Andrew this hard. He feels it in his stomach and in the palms of his hands, arousal and attraction and happiness swirling together into a cocktail of emotion he’s never prepared for.

He breaks away from the kiss to catch his breath, pressure building up behind his eyes annoyingly. Andrew stares down at him in concern, but before he can ask anything Neil is wrapping his arms around Andrew’s shoulders and pushing until all his weight is on Neil, enveloping him completely with his warm weight. Neil lets out a sigh against Andrew’s shoulder, and Andrew slides his hands between Neil in the bed to hold him back.

Neil is feeling a whole lot right now, and thankfully Andrew seems to understand. He traces his thumb over Neil’s bottom lip and asks “Slow?”

Neil nods and gasps, and Andrew wastes no time, pushing his hips down on Neil’s and gently dragging a hand down his body to get him ready. He preps Neil slowly and carefully, but not too gently, peppering kisses on Neil’s shoulders every time his body shudders.

He works Neil open and pushes into him slowly, and Neil lets himself sink into the feeling, quiet and content in the stillness of the night. The heater in the corner of Andrew’s bedroom whirs and cars whoosh past the window, but Neil’s mind is silent.

~

The next morning, Neil finally meets Jean’s Jeremy.

Or, more accurately, Neil walks into Jean and Kevin’s apartment and Jeremy is sitting on the couch.

Neil only knows it’s him because of the egregious amount of detail Jean goes into when he talks about him, so he tries not to be too obvious about recognizing him. “Hello,” he greets in a way he hopes is polite “Is Jean here?”

Jeremy snaps his head up like a dog who’s name has been called. “Hi!” he greets, “and yes, he’s just getting changed now. You must be Neil.”

Neil nods, tilting his head a little in question. Jeremy notices, and he clarifies by saying “Jean told me you were on your way.”

Speaking of Jean, the man comes tumbling out of his own bedroom looking like he’s been through a tornado. His hair is messy and his eyes are a little wild, clothes thrown on hastily. Neil glances between him and Jeremy’s perfect composure and raises an eyebrow at his friend, who blushes.

“Hmm,” Neil hums, “What went on here?”

“Nothing,” Jean says at the same time as Jeremy shrugs, nonchalant.

Neil hides his grin. “Right,” he allows, making his way to the piano “Shall we?”

Jean visibly shakes himself, and Neil is almost impressed at how thoroughly Jeremy seems to have broken his resolve. Jean makes Neil start off the ‘lesson’ by tapping out the keys and tunes he remembers from last time, and then dives into teaching him a few new things. Neil has trouble keeping the keys straight in his head, and he always presses down far harder than it necessary, but he can now successfully play _Twinkle Twinkle Little Star_ and that’s a start.

Throughout the lesson, Jeremy sits upside down on the couch, tapping away at his phone and shifting almost constantly. Neil figures that energy is a good balance to Jean’s usual nonchalant nature.

Eventually, Kevin storms into the apartment with armfuls of takeout Chinese food, and the four of them sit around the coffee table and eat. Jean glances over at Jeremy every spare second he has, and Kevin has started an intense, mostly one-sided debate about the merits of space travel, so Neil takes his empty packages to the trash can in silence, leaning against the windowsill and watching the cars roll by quietly.

After a minute or two of solitude, Jean appears at his side, a towering but silent presence over his shoulder. Neil glances over at the man to find him staring forlornly out the window. “So,” Neil prompts, “Jeremy?”

Jean groans a little, but his mouth quirks up into a smile anyways. “It seems so,” he says, and Neil smiles back at him.

“Finally,” Neil huffs, because the first rule of friendship is not letting your friend know you’re happy for them when you could get teased for it.

Jean rolls his eyes, resting a large hand on top of Neil’s head and messing up the curls he finds there. “I’m glad we tried this again,” he says quietly, and Neil hums in agreement. “It’s nice to be friends again.”

Neil looks back out the window, tracing a finger through the puffs of condensation in the corners. “Me too,” he allows, leaning against Jean’s side a little “You’re not too bad.”

Jean laughs, leading Neil back into the living room to break apart Jeremy and Kevin’s conversation before they get too into it and break something.

Neil watches Jean’s eyes shimmer in that way he hasn’t seen from him in years, sinking into the couch cushions with a grin and finally letting the relief wash over him.

Jean smiles at him, and Neil smiles back. They’re finally out of the woods.

~

By the time Neil finally makes his way back to his own apartment it’s half past 10pm and his cheeks are sore from laughing.

He swings the door open, not expecting the sight before him one bit. Aaron is nursing a glass of wine in the beanbag chair, watching on amusedly as Andrew and Katelyn play a game of chess.

Neil blinks, stopping still in the doorway. Only Aaron looks up to greet Neil, gesturing at the two silent players gathered around the coffee table in an obvious show of exasperation.

Neil drops his stuff in his bedroom quickly, changing into sweats and wrapping his fluffy grey blanket around his shoulders as he walks back into the living room. He glances at Aaron, who shifts in the beanbag to make room for Neil to flop down beside him. “What are they doing?” Neil asks, maybe a little stupidly.

Aaron snorts. “Playing ch—” he starts pointedly before Neil cuts him off.

“You know what I mean,” he scoffs. “Why are they playing chess together?”

Aaron shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine. Andrew came here to hang out with me, she was here, they had this weird non-verbal conversation, and now they’re playing chess.”

As strange as it sounds, it’s not too out of the ordinary, Neil supposes. Ever since Neil and Aaron had made their amends, Andrew had promised to try to get along better with Katelyn, which usually means that he shows up to the apartment at random times, says a few words to her, and then ignores her in favor of Neil for the rest of the night.

Neil stretches up to look at the confusing mess of pieces on the chess board. He’d never been taught how to play, and he’s not even sure what the names of the pieces are, so he turns to Aaron and asks “Who’s winning?”

Aaron shrugs once again. “Anyone’s game,” he says simply. “They’re playing slow as fuck though, so you might want to get your earbuds or something. They yelled at me when I tried to put something on TV an hour ago.”

Neil huffs, leaning into his friend’s side. “I think I’ll just watch,” he says.

Aaron tugs his earbuds back to his ears from where they had been resting on his chest, tugging the corner of Neil’s blanket to cover himself. “Suit yourself,” he says.

The game goes on for far too long in Neil’s opinion, silence and nothing but the occasional “check” to fill the empty air. Eventually, though, Katelyn leans back smugly, says “checkmate” and gets up to use the restroom while Andrew cleans up the board.

Neil huffs a laugh at Andrew’s sour expression. “She beat you?”

Andrew flips him off.

Katelyn returns to the living room shortly, flopping herself on the couch and glancing over at Andrew. “Good game,” she says, and then: “Mario Kart?”

Andrew, for some reason, nods. They set up the TV and actually fight for a few minutes over who gets to be Rosalina, Andrew claiming the character after an intense match of _rock, paper, scissors._

“What the hell,” Aaron whispers quietly, one earbud hanging in midair as he watches the game unfold.

Neil nods in agreement, watching Andrew shamelessly blue-shell Katelyn as he’s in second place, winning by only a few seconds. “It’s better than silence,” he says.

Aaron huffs. “It’s _weird_.”

“Yeah,” Neil admits, turning to look his friend in the face. “Good weird.”

Aaron nods distractedly, before he turns to meet Neil’s eyes. “They get along well.”

Neil rolls his eyes at his friend, turning to watch the screen again. He shoves Aaron’s shoulder with his own “No thanks to you,” he teases.

“Hey,” Aaron says, jabbing his elbow in Neil’s side “I’ve already apologized for that.”

And he had. After their initial conversation, Neil and Aaron had apologized to each other tenfold, making a sort of game out of it. “Say it again,” Neil demands playfully.

Aaron huffs, but he’s sincere as always when he says “I’m sorry for hurting our friendship, oh my dearest Neil.”

Neil nods proudly, scrunching his nose when Aaron says the last bit. “You just always have to ruin it somehow,” he complains.

“It’s my brand,” Aaron says haughtily, “Now you say it.”

Neil grins. “I’m sorry for hurting our friendship,” he repeats, and then: “I’m glad we worked it out.”

Aaron shifts further down into the beanbag chair, pulling the blanket up to cover his face and closing his eyes. “Me too,” he says.

Neil shakes his head fondly, watching as Katelyn and Andrew start another round and Andrew wins yet another _rock, paper, scissors_ for Rosaline.

Neil’s eyes trace Andrew’s side profile until he looks over at him, raising an eyebrow. “Good?” Andrew asks quietly.

Neil drags his gaze from Andrew to Aaron, who is sleeping peacefully despite the chaos of the Mario Kart game, and then back to Andrew. He had wondered endlessly at the beginning of this thing if he had bit off more than he could chew. He had wondered every step of the way if he had made the right decision. The right decision to work at Palmetto’s, to kiss Andrew, to reach out to Jean. He had doubted himself so much over these last few months and ended up in the best place possible—the exact place he’d never thought he’d be able to be.

He thinks about those few months in the darkness of secrecy with Andrew when he’d thought whole-heartedly that he was the happiest he’d ever be, even with his guilt and Aaron’s suspicion scratching on his heels. He thinks about those years without Jean—those first few months of ear-splitting silence and losing touch and the numbness of feeling forgotten.

Neil thinks about meeting Matt and Dan at the arcade every few weeks and braiding Allison’s hair in the employee room before a shift. Of Roland’s spot-on music playlists and Nicky’s insistent kindness. Of those few days when he’d thought Aaron hated him and those first few weeks after when the air between them had been stiff and unkind.

He thinks about Jean’s hands splayed across piano keys and Kevin’s endless rambling in his ears. About the pressure of Andrew’s kiss on his mouth and over his spine; the flashes of movie-light across the slope of his nose and the steady way in which he takes Neil apart.

Neil feels Aaron’s presence next to him, contentment in his chest and emotion building behind his eyes.

“Yeah,” Neil says finally, meeting Andrew’s eyes and listening to Aaron breath against his side. “I’m good.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That’s a wrap! Chefdrew will forever live on in my heart and it’s likely I’ll revisit this universe at some point. Thank you to everyone on twitter who encouraged me and thank you to Freddie Baxter from Cucumber for giving me endless chef!Andrew inspiration. O7 for Chefdrew.
> 
> Do check out the wonderful chefdrew art linked below and let me know what you thought about this story if you feel so inclined :) Thank you for the support <3

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me on [twitter](https://mobile.twitter.com/5a5b5p5)
> 
> and on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/andrewsbutterflyknife)
> 
> edit// you can also find the wonderful [greywarrenn on twitter](https://mobile.twitter.com/greywarrenn) where they have made chefdrew art twice!!! [here](https://twitter.com/greywarrenn/status/1324965874277642242?s=20) and [here](https://twitter.com/greywarrenn/status/1313088172243341312?s=20)


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